Connection Draining enables AWS customers to shutter unneeded virtual servers without disrupting users’ in-flight requests to apps. Amazon has a brand new service, highlighted in a tweet by AWS CTO Werner Vogels on Thursday: Elastic Load Balancing now supports Connection Draining, he said, calling it “good news.” Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancing service enables a hectic application to spread incoming traffic over a couple of instance of the applying for better response times. When combined with Amazon’s Auto Scaling service, both act together to dynamically allocate and reallocate resources in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud to fit a customer’s needs. Just as traffic often increases, it also decreases, necessitating a scaling back of resources. That’s where Connection Draining is available in. It’s needed during a workload’s scale-back period within the cloud. When traffic diminishes from a peak, instances and network connections needs to be shut down. Closing network connections risks disrupting application responses which are still within the delivery stage. If they’re closed clumsily, users may even... Read More »

Nordic Combined Troubleshooting: Not for the faint of heart. Resolve your non-technical spouse’s email connectivity issue over the telephone, within the air, while ski jumping. Sochi Olympics 2014: 10 Technologies In Spotlight (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Few activities engage an audience as effectively as sport. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, where competitors will publicly struggle to master themselves and their rivals in contests of mental and physical prowess. The human drama of sport, sadly, remains absent from the technology business, in the event you exclude iPhone line-waiting, a competition already on its way out. There isn’t any shortage of competition — we’ve patent wars, product release races, and battles for market share — but tech industry conflicts play out on balance sheets, in datacenters, and in living rooms, out of public view. The tech community needs its own version of the Olympics, an international movement to celebrate success, innovation, and great engineering in a technique... Read More »

Larry Ellison’s Oracle human capital management keynote results in questions on IBM, SAP, games, and island real estate. 16 Top Big Data Analytics Platforms (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) After a whole day of sessions at Oracle HCM World in Las Vegas and a one-hour keynote by Larry Ellison, perhaps it is just not surprising that among the HR professionals in attendance desired to ask the fame CEO questions on topics except human capital management. Ellison was only too happy to oblige, talking about acquisitions, competitors, acquisitions, games, and his plans for the island of Lanai in Hawaii, which he bought in 2012 for an estimated $500 million. Of course, topic A for Ellison throughout his “Modern HCM is Social HCM” keynote was Oracle HCM, the socially enabled application suite that Oracle lately touts as its fastest-growing cloud computing offering. Ellison called HCM and customer-experience apps an important systems at any company or government agency because they facilitate communications and manage the crucial information... Read More »

CIOs have to stay previous to the wave by staking a claim inside the wearables ecosystem through apps and always be asking: What do employees and customers need from wearables? By now, everyone from techies to gamers to athletes has heard that wearables are “the following big thing.” As a 20-year veteran of the technology industry, I’ve seen the emergence of latest next-gen technologies come and go – from the shopper server to the desktop, to PCs and laptops, to the present mobile era. Look at today’s wearables and you will notice something quite remarkable this time around. What makes this latest wave of hardware exponentially more exciting than other evolutions is the connectivity with the cloud. Due to the cloud, devices like Google Glass and Fitbit have access to geolocation information, your past history, the net, plus the facility to record, broadcast and post to social media. [Google Glass and other easy-to-use wearables stress importance of user-friendliness. Read What Google Glass Can Teach IT]... Read More »

Satya Nadella has the brains and experience to become Microsoft’s CEO — but does he have the pointy tongue of Gates or Ballmer? Match these Microsoft CEO quotes to their outspoken owners. Microsoft In 2013: 7 Lessons Learned (Click image for larger view and for slideshow.) Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella has some big shoes to fill. He faces great expectations with regards to innovation and profit, his predecessors set the bar very high, yada yada yada… But that is not what I’m talking about. Microsoft’s new leader will play follow-as much as two of one of the most prolifically quotable CEOs in history. Nadella, displaying a passion for cricket, a powerful intellect, and a borderline-hipster wardrobe, is already carving out an identity. But he has nothing at the cult of personality that formed around Gates. When a satirical website claimed the Microsoft founder told a reporter, “I provide you with 1,000,000 bucks, and that i get to sever your arm here,” and “Let’s accept... Read More »