Amazon Web Services goes down, taking Netflix, Reddit, Pocket and more with it

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Amazon Web Services goes down, taking Netflix, Reddit, Pocket and more with it
// The Next Web - International technology news, business & culture


If you're having trouble accessing several parts of the Web today, it's because Amazon Web Services is having a bit of a glitch this morning. A server issue in Virginia is affecting most of the northeast, killing the infrastructure for many popular products and services including Netflix, Product Hunt, Medium, SocialFlow, Buffer, GroupMe, Pocket, Viber Amazon Echo and more. The outage occurred around 6 AM ET. Amazon DynamoDB goes down. Takes down Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Nest, Medium, Mediacom, IMDB, and 21 other AWS services. Ouch. — Adrian Jimenez (@AdrianJimenez) September 20, 2015 At The Next Web, we use SocialFlow as our tool…

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Amazon Zocalo

While busy coding away on some API endpoints and refactoring some code and making some schema changes, I realised I had not opened my email client all day and after a quick scan for anything requiring my immediate attention I noticed that Amazon had given me early access to the new Zocalo product.

First thoughts

Initially I thought this is Dropbox with Sharepoint and that with web, mobile apps, Windows and Mac clients with promises of browser plugins this could be pretty cool.
“Amazon Zocalo is a fully managed, secure enterprise storage and sharing service with strong administrative controls and feedback capabilities that improve user productivity.”
Intro Video

Benefits

• typical amazon storage in the cloud
• low cost initially if you are a start up for example
• easy to get started
• most importantly active directory support

Active Directory

Amazon Zocalo can integrate with your existing Active Directory. This means that your users can easily access Amazon Zocalo using their existing Active Directory credentials. This is a big win for the enterprise.

Amazon Workspaces

Not 100 percent sure but when linked to Amazon Workspaces you could have a team all working on a Windows 7 experience with office apps and Zocola.

More later when not as busy!

In the meantime have a read of the docs and look at some screenshots of the iPad app. Ok break over back to the code!
Documentation
Screenshots

CloudCheckr Review

So as I’ve progressed to living in the Visual Studio and Microsoft Windows eco system to using a Mac and Xamarin building cross platform apps to also being a head of devops and using the Amazon Web Services Cloud to setup 3 new start ups now there have been some tools and services that have stayed with me and improved and been a vital part of my toolbox.
CloudCheckr is one such tool and has come on in leaps and bounds since I started using it for a single use case back in the day so I thought I would post about this application and what it did for me then. I went from the free use teir to a paid one I think its that good even though I am just using it to monitor some personal projects.

Best Practices

My first and still an important use case as I was getting to know AWS was best practises. Is my cloud setup secure, available and am I under or over usage?
This was and is still a very useful tool as it’s easy to forget to lock something down or forget that you fire up 1000 servers somewhere as a test.
Have I left ports open? Having a service send you best practises is worth every penny spent.

Spend Optimization

This was next up once I knew things were secure. Getting warning and potential cost savings especially important with start ups was invaluable.

More Features

Since then they have added new features which are explained better on their website so I shall finish by just linking off to them and suggest you give them a free trial you will not be disappointed.


Home Page

Cost Allocation

Resource Reporting

You Tube Video

amazon-workspaces-review

Amazon Workspaces

So during an insomniac night I had a play with Amazon’s new workspaces feature that provides a fully managed virtual desktop experience fully controlled from their web based console.
Being a long term but ex windows guy now I am quite interested in the possibilities of pay as you go and more active directory linked virtualised machines now provided by Amazon for testing and one off tasks but the value for everyone from one man operations to something much larger are clear.
They have a very good Workspaces intro
With more detailed information available
So using the closet data centre to me I created a workspace using the web console by providing a username and email address and about 20 minutes later it was provisioned and I got the intro email with all the information I needed to connect to my instance.

Once I followed the instructions and entered the password I got to download the client from this page

Being on a mac I downloaded and installed the mac installer and was soon connected to a very fast desktop client machine.

A very nice experience indeed Not the most complete test but it is very late and I am very tired right now. More later on this new and shiny feature.