Microsoft’s cloud services, including Xbox Live, were disrupted Thursday because of a DNS error. Services connected to Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud suffered a disruption Thursday — the second one interruption in a under a month. Online reports indicate impacted services included Microsoft.com, Outlook.com, Office 365, and Xbox Live. Microsoft had resolved lots of the problems by Thursday night, avoiding the possibly cataclysmic possibility that Xbox Live will be down when Xbox One units went on sale just after midnight Friday morning. The disruptions began at 2:22 p.m. PT and stretched across multiple regions. Microsoft corporate vice chairman Scott Guthrie confirmed via Twitter that the issue failed to involve Azure itself. Rather, “The issue is a DNS name server issue outside of azure.” Microsoft said Thursday evening that Azure was running normally. As of Friday morning, the Azure service dashboard showed most services were functioning as intended, though partial interruptions were plaguing compute functions in Asia, Europe, and the u. s. . Despite the outage, Windows... Read More »
Author: admin
Google Details Google Drive Android API
[ Developer] Earlier this month, Google upgraded Google Play Services to version 4.1. Among the many big features during this latest upgrade was the inclusion of a Google Drive Android API. Now Google has offered more details on what it says provides developers “a faster, seamless experience that allows your apps to integrate with the Drive backend within minutes.” To start us off, Google says the Drive API will sync app data stored locally with Google Drive storage within the cloud. This occurs automatically so a users locally stored data will always be backed up on Google Drive. If the user happens to be offline when creating new local data, the Google Drive API will sync that data with the cloud the subsequent time they get online. With this being Android, the Google Drive Android API was designed to work on virtually every device. There are three specific features try to be privy to though: There’s reduced impact at the weight of your apps. Because... Read More »
Bitcoin Thefts Surge, DDoS Hackers Take Millions
Cryptographic currency’s massive rise in value ends up in a corresponding increase in online heists by criminals seeking easy paydays. 10 IT Job Titles We Miss (Click image for larger view.) Say you’ve created a cryptographic currency called bitcoin that promises users relative anonymity and untraceable transactions. What may be able to get it wrong? The reply, obviously, is that these virtues also attract hackers, malware developers, and arranged crime rings who wouldn’t consider carefully about committing virtual bank robberies. Earlier this month, as an example, Bitcoin Internet Payment System (BIPS), a Denmark-based Bitcoin payment processor, suffered a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Unfortunately for users of the company’s free online wallets for storing bitcoins, the DDoS attack was merely a smokescreen for a digital heist that quickly drained numerous wallets, netting the attackers a reported 1,295 bitcoins — worth nearly $1 million — and leaving wallet users with little chance that they’d ever see their money again. “On November 15th BIPS was the objective of a... Read More »
Windows Azure Gets New Features, PCI DSS Compliance
[ Developer] It’s a brand new year and Microsoft’s cloud computing platform has gotten another update, complete with new features that asp.net developers can make the most of. Microsoft Developer VP Scott Guthrie this week detailed all of the latest Windows Azure updates in a brand new blog post. The biggest rollout inside the latest Azure update is support for staged publishing. Developers can now enable the feature for Azure sites, letting them use a staged version in their sites for testing updates before immediately rolling them out to the true site. The feature also allows site managers to roll out their changes without notice, instead of updating files so as. Other updates to Azure include an “Always On” feature, in an effort to regularly ping websites to make certain they may be active, and support for SenchaTouch on Azure Mobile Services. Monitoring for sites and SQL databases has also been improved, with site metrics now updated every minute and alerts expanded further for SQL... Read More »
Open-Source Cloud Hardware Grows Up Fast
Open Compute Project picks up key new members, sets more ambitious goals, and shows its multi-faceted, multi-chip side at annual summit. 6 Ways SDN Shakes Up The Enterprise (Click image for larger view and slideshow.)
The Open Compute Project founded by Facebook has made rapid strides in what have been a narrow sphere of influence. The cloud is an x86 world, and, in its first three years, OCP has put out several motherboard and server designs for cloud projects.
The early adopters has been primarily big financial services companies, reminiscent of Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, and Goldman Sachs. On the Open Compute Project Summit this week in San Jose, Calif., OCP showed it usually is able to grow beyond one industrial segment into others, resembling online gaming and pharmaceuticals, and expand the reach of open-source hardware in different ways.
OCP broadened its technique to licensing, in addition. The hardware designs come in under an Apache Software Foundation-variety of license, where... Read More »