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    The Next Cloud Outage is Coming—What You Can Do To Survive

    Josh Stella

    This article was first published in DZone's Cloud Zone on April 3, 2017. The repercussions of recent cloud outages—AWS’s S3 crash and Azure’s Active Directory cascading failure—linger in IT departments and manifest in revenue loss. But, the bigger story is that the next outage is around the corner—unpredictable, coming to get us on a random Tuesday. Whether businesses are using cloud providers, on-premise data centers, or hybrid setups to host web services and backends, infrastructure failures are a fact of life and have to be on our radars as a matter of routine. This makes architecting for failure and for the future, from the start, among the most pressing imperatives for business IT departments. The next five years will see the rise and democratization of centralized control...

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    Continuous Delivery with Fugue and CircleCI

    Drew Wright

    For Fugue, providing documentation is about more than just creating a high-level reference for information. Our documentation content ranges from examples of creating complex infrastructure with Fugue to walkthroughs of integration with a number of popular devops tools in use today, which is what we’re here to talk to you about. So… why did we build this particular example? In short, we picked an integration with CircleCI as one of our examples because it is a great way to automate the build, test, and deployment processes. It provides integration with some of the most popular source code management systems like Github and Bitbucket, and is used by leading edge companies including Facebook, Kickstarter, and Spotify. Continuous integration (CI) speeds up development and release...

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    Why Write a Book?

    Drew Wright

    “It worked on my laptop!” Seven weeks into your latest project, you’ve gotten to the point where management wants a demo. Your first spike was run from a node server that you ran on your laptop. When another developer joined, you moved the environment to Vagrant so you could share an image. When the third and fourth bodies were assigned, you decided to save time by automating the installation with Chef. You’ve all been collaborating effectively for weeks and now you need to put it out on a cloud provider to give your stakeholders access. Your cloud infrastructure was set up by a different team with domain expertise on the platform. Sadly, that did not confer upon them a psychic ability to anticipate the networking needs of your Riak cluster. Nor did it allow them to anticipate...

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    A Holiday Season Kickoff at AWS re:Invent 2016 — Gifts From the Cloud

    Drew Wright

    We’re a couple of weeks out of re:Invent and its dizzying buzz—the slew of service and feature announcements, the industry tracks and community meetings, the Mini Cons, the integration and how-to session deep dives, the intensive networking, the mall of sponsors with every manner of product presentation … even festive bling from the ever-present registration DJ. We’ve had some time to digest what we saw and learned this time around and to think about a few of the more compelling offerings. In this post, we’re not going to recap the full laundry list of new services introduced or feature enhancements (many especially targeted at enterprise). Good overviews are abundant; here are ones from InfoQ, VentureBeat, and Rackspace. Instead, let’s zero in on a handful of provocative...

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    We’ll Miss You, Harry Weller, Our Partner, Mentor, & Friend

    Josh Stella

    Harry Weller, General Partner leading NEA’s east coast venture practice, passed away unexpectedly on November 19, 2016. Please see NEA’s words for Harry. J. R. R. Tolkien, one of Harry’s favorites, said, “A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds.” Harry never counted on life or decisions or business being safe. He looked into this world and bypassed the routine—working fiercely, shaping vivid insights, sharing a smart magic, driving others forward emphatically and lifting them up generously at the same time. He knew that noise was just noise and broke past it. He had the rare wisdom that an explorer finds and shares. A phenomenon in business, Harry was a committed partner to companies and technologies. He had an uncanny instinct about both. His profound impact on Fugue will ever...

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    The Next-Generation Cloud CMDB: Ludwig Code

    Drew Wright

    In a recent report, Ovum described Fugue as "a CMDB for APIs." A configuration management database (CMDB) is a single source of truth for configuration of complex systems. This is a crucial aspect of Fugue, one where running your operations with Fugue offers a lot of value to you. Fugue's CMDB is an effect of our declarative model for configuration, built around our typesafe, compiled Ludwig language. The Fugue CMDB is not a proprietary store with a form-based interface; it is Ludwig code, managed in a VCS of your choice, like git or svn. That code is a declarative configuration of infrastructure (or other API) state. Once it is run as a process in Fugue, that declaration is made real and immutable with machine precision. In this way, a well-managed body of Ludwig compositions and a...

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    Regions Beyond Regions: Global Cloud Infrastructure Expansions

    Drew Wright

    Think about the cloud as a massive global computer. That paradigm—with developers and users managing hyperscale cloud services within its framework—means tapping into a kind of pattern recognition. Cloud data centers, substations, and fiber are physical components of a cloud motherboard. Genuine cloud operating systems like Fugue can be built. Cloud processes can be represented with a pid equivalent. And so on. This year, 2016, is a year of expansion. Below, you see an aggregate mapping of a wide swath of Earth’s cloud “hardware”—installed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM/Softlayer. All of it, arguably, can be and eventually will be manipulated as parts of the same machine. Shown are 78 global regions with cloud data centers for the four...

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    AWS Lambda and the Evolution of the Cloud

    Josh Stella

    For several years, cloud adoption by developers, tech companies, and enterprises has been gaining momentum. Global cloud spending is accelerating and market forecasts are impressive. The cloud is often thought of as a collection of remote data centers. It’s generally used that way by organizations when they first experiment with it—or even when they move whole applications to it. Not surprisingly, cloud service providers offer familiar topologies of services for folks conversant with the data center: virtual machines and containers, virtual networks, load balancers, etc. But, these really are metaphors rather than the traditional things they resemble on data floors. They are useful abstractions in composing applications with semi-traditional architectures. The metaphors nevertheless...

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    Our Article at O'Reilly on Immutable Infrastructure

    Drew Wright

    We're big fans of immutable infrastructure at Luminal (the company behind Fugue), and we're not shy about it! Immutable infrastructure brings a variety of benefits, including: simplifying operations, increasing system reliability, and continuous deployment with fewer failures. To that end, we're excited to collaborate with O'Reilly to publish "An Introduction to Immutable Infrastructure: Why you should stop managing infrastructure and start really programming it." In this article, Josh Stella, Founder and CEO of Luminal, urges us to give up on artisanal infrastructure, which increases operational complexity and causes many system failures. "Historically, we've thought of machine uptime and maintenance as desirable because we associate the health of the overall service or...

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    A Future of Cloud

    Josh Stella

    In two previous posts, I explored the concepts of "Minimum Viable Clouds" and "More than Minimum Clouds." To recap, a Minimum Viable Cloud must: be an SOA hide implementation be fully automated be a utility have global fault tolerance be Opex A cloud that is More than the Minimum must: promote stateless, distributed compute have asynchronous messaging have data persistence as a service Future clouds are those that move past the performance and composition aspects of cloud-native applications into new territory in efficiency and security. There are many possible futures for cloud, and likely several that will be realized. At Luminal, we have a vision of cloud computing that provides significantly more control, efficiency, and security than is currently...

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