Cloud Computing Archives

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of blog posts about Online Tech’s cloud locations and the teams that work behind the scenes. Welcome back on our data center world tour! In our last post, we were in Michigan learning about Online Tech’s four data centers and headquarters. Today, we travel to Austin, Texas! Aside from being known as the place for the SXSW music festival, Austin is also home to a burgeoning tech scene. Its central location within the US (four hour or less direct flight from nearly anywhere in the country) makes it ideal for data storage. Here are some other fun facts about our Austin location: The data center is located in the Met Center business park, which is ideally near both the city center and highway access. It boasts 45,000 square feet and is perfect for production and disaster recovery solutions. The facility is part of CyrusOne’s ultra-low latency National IX Internet fiber exchange, and offers the operational and uptime requirements needed to meet or exceed many of today’s compliance requirements including HIPAA, PCI, ISO 27001, FISMA, and TIA 942 Class 4. There is fully redundant 2N power and cooling onsite to ensure that any…

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What is Invisible Infrastructure?

November 14, 2018

IT infrastructure, what we’ve all come to know and love (or hate, depending on your viewpoint) is the driving force behind all of our machines. What if it were to be so widely available that you didn’t even have to think about it when building a program? In a less dramatic sense, this is the definition behind invisible infrastructure. History Remember back in the day when personal computer commercials used to say “powered by a 6 core processor with a million gigs of RAM and other awesome technical specs”? That’s because in those days, it was important to the consumer that their hardware was powerful and capable. But in today’s world of software-defined everything, edge computing and cloud-native applications, it’s expected that infrastructure is available, reliable, secure and compliant. To put it simply, it just has to work. Invisible advances? In the last 10 years, there have been huge advances in the hardware and data center worlds, but the rise of cloud computing especially means the location of our data is not as important as it once was. Data centers are built literally all over the world, and the hardware that powers them is cheaper and more readily available than ever….

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What is serverless computing?

November 1, 2017

What is serverless computing? The idea is growing in popularity, but the term honestly sounds like an oxymoron. How does it work, and why should you consider it for your IT organization? Well, the name is a false promise–there are actually servers involved with serverless computing. They just aren’t managed by the organization. A serverless computing model means your cloud provider takes care of adding, removing, and/or adjusting your server resources based upon demand. You end up with a more accurate bill for your usage because it’s based literally on milliseconds, not hours. There are a couple of ideas behind this: One is to avoid prepaying for resources that might be unused, resulting in huge savings for your organization. The second is taking the burden of server management off of the developer’s hands, leaving them free to simply write code. Serverless now This sounds like something out of the future, but the truth is, the future is now. The big cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft and Google) all offer serverless computing services, but Amazon’s Lambda is perhaps the most well-known. According to their website, “Lambda runs your code on high-availability compute infrastructure and performs all the administration of the compute resources,…

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