Articles : Cloud

We talk a lot about the importance of cloud computing and moving infrastructure into the cloud for better performance and availability on a global scale. However, with expectations for application performance continuing to rise and people connecting in more remote places than ever, some businesses need to do more than simply maintain a cloud presence – they need to consider the benefit of setting up a hosted edge environment. A hosted edge can provide a massive reduction in latency, translating to a huge improvement to user experience, more conversions, more revenue, and better customer retention. However, the edge is often harder to secure than a core network, and more variable than the big public clouds. Can businesses enjoy the latency advantage of the edge with application security they can trust?

Many companies have realized that they need to embrace the cloud in some form or another. After all, the cloud offers greater availability across a global landscape as well as improved redundancy and performance regardless of where a user accesses sites, so it’s far easier to use cloud providers’ tools than to bear the burden and expense of managing servers around the globe.

With climate change and resource shortages increasingly dangerous problems for our planet and society, it's important that we continue to increase efforts to live and work more sustainably. One of the key opportunities we have comes in the form of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) which are at the forefront of our technological innovation. The tech sector can play an important role in driving sustainability by enabling lower energy and resource use.

With computing technology constantly evolving, many companies stuck with aging systems need to revisit their current setups and possibly replace them with modern ones that are compatible with the cloud-centric microservices of today. And while keeping up to date with the latest software trends seems like an obvious choice for a technically minded person, the truth is that for many large companies where software is not their primary concern, having to upgrade or replace existing systems is incredibly expensive.

Promises of never-before-seen graphical fidelity were set to catapult the video game industry to new heights when the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles were released last year. It’s interesting to think that, regardless of how remarkable graphics might seem today, especially considering the improved rendering technologies being developed by all the different video game engines, gaming graphics will always eventually be constrained by the hardware. Inevitably, the graphics of the video gaming consoles that we see today will become obsolete as newer technology becomes available.

On Tuesday, June 8th, 2021 at 09:47 UTC, Fastly's Content Delivery Network (CDN) went down. Sites affected included Reddit, eBay, Twitch, GOV.UK, Pinterest, and Vimeo. Some were affected in smaller ways - Twitter emojis were no longer visible, for example.

It’s the end of the day, you finally get a chance to sit down in front of the TV, reach for that gaming controller and prepare to unwind over a couple of sessions with fellow gamers from around the globe.  One of the benefits of our online world is that we can easily boot up a game, log in to an online portal and begin a gaming session with people anywhere in the world, in a manner of seconds. As instantaneous as it all seems, there is a whole host of operations going on in the background enabling gamers to enjoy their favorite pastime. The ability to instantly interact with people from across the globe is nothing short of a marvel of engineering. 

How To Stay Online, Scale-Up, And Keep Latency Down Launching a video game may be among the most challenging operational tasks today. Demand can be hard to predict. Launches are binary events that defy load testing. Setting up the right cloud infrastructure takes foresight and planning, and while over-provisioning wastes money, under-provisioning is probably even worse. Expect upset customers screaming at you on Twitter, Discord, and Reddit when a game starts glitching under the massive weight of millions of users. Here’s a quickstart guide to best practices for planning your cloud infrastructure to support a successful game launch.

Our first blog of this series outlined the various challenges posed to DevOps and IT leaders resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. In this blog we take a closer look at designing for resilience using a Cloud-N disaster recovery and mitigation strategy.