Hasta La Gadget!

Amazon has publicly apologized for the outage that stopped Netflix users from spending Christmas Eve slumped in front of How It’s Made re-runs while slurping egg nog, blaming human error for the server downtime. According to Amazon, a developer inadvertently deleted part of the “ELB state data” which handles load balancing – which servers deliver content to each user across different locations – and it took several hours of testing and troubleshooting to figure out what had gone wrong.

“The service disruption began at 12:24 PM PST on December 24th when a portion of the ELB state data was logically deleted. This data is used and maintained by the ELB control plane to manage the configuration of the ELB load balancers in the region (for example tracking all the backend hosts to which traffic should be routed by each load balancer). The data was deleted by a maintenance process that was inadvertently run against the production ELB state data. This process was run by one of a very small number of developers who have access to this production environment. Unfortunately, the developer did not realize the mistake at the time. After this data was deleted, the ELB control plane began experiencing high latency and error rates for API calls to manage ELB load balancers” Amazon

Unfortunately, the initial efforts to take a snapshot of the system configurations prior to the accidental deletion – a process which took several hours – did not work. A second method was cooked up, which was more successful; however, installing it and bringing all of the systems back online was not so straightforward as simply overwriting the patchy section of data.

Instead, Amazon’s AWS team had to merge the new ELB state data with the old – a process which took almost three hours alone – and then spent a further five hours gradually re-enabling all of the service workflows and APIs in a way which did not affect any correctly running process. Amazon says the system was operating normally by 12:05PM PST.

“Last, but certainly not least, we want to apologize. We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses, and we know this disruption came at an inopportune time for some of our customers. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive further improvement in the ELB service” Amazon

As well as the apology, Amazon says it has implemented new policies to make sure the same problem doesn’t happen again. The ELB state data is now harder to delete without specific approval, rather than under blanket permissions for the small number of developers with access, and Amazon has updated its data recovery policies with the new skills it was forced to learn. “We are confident that we could recover ELB state data in a similar event significantly faster (if necessary) for any future operational event” the company’s data team says.

In fact, Amazon plans to make some lemonade from the Christmas Eve lemons, building new server systems that can automatically recover data rather than wait for human intervention. “We believe that we can reprogram our ELB control plane workflows to more thoughtfully reconcile the central service data with the current load balancer state” the AWS team suggests. “This would allow the service to recover automatically from logical data loss or corruption without needing manual data restoration.”

[via Bloomberg]

Amazon: Sorry for Netflix downtime, here’s what we got wrong is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Don’t you miss the good old days when certain words had meanings that are so far removed from today? For instance, ‘gay’ meant happy and without a care in the world, and ‘cloud’ was a noun used to describe those fluffy white things in the sky, and if you looked closely enough, you would be able to find angels strumming their harps and lyres while humming a soothing tune. Well, fast forward to the 21st century, ‘cloud’ has taken on an entirely different meaning, where it is now widely accepted in the computing world as a platform where your data and even processing can be done remotely, as everything is connected via the Internet to the cloud. It is an ideal way to work with your files stored on the cloud, and you need not worry about folks stealing some crucial files when you are on the move. Since we are on the topic of cloud services, how about moving from something serious like work to a more casual activity like gaming?

G-cluster is currently inviting IPTV and wireless operators and game publishers to jump aboard the cloud bandwagon, especially at CES 2013 that is happening in Las Vegas early next year. Basically, G-cluster is best described to be a fully-featured white label service that offers the largest deployments at scale, sporting the most deployed catalog of casual and AAA games, and they fully intend to debut their Game Machine platform so that operators are able to deliver premium and casual games to the TV, all done without having to own a gaming console in your living room in the first place.without the need for a gaming console.

You will still need the G-cluster Game Machine as an intermediary, however, where it will plug into the HDMI port on HDMI-equipped televisions while connecting to the home Wi-Fi network in order for one to access the service. You can then use a game pad with a wireless receiver, or smartphones or tablets, in order to dictate the gameplay on the TV, where you can choose to fly solo or with friends, where they will rely on other devices such as PCs, smartphones, or tablets.

Press Release
[ G-cluster delivers cloud gaming to the masses copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

If you hadn’t noticed, Dropbox is on a major photography kick lately, and it’s not stopping just because the holidays are nearly in full swing. Its new Android beta helps users deal with their photos by the bushel, either sharing or scrapping multiple photos at once as well as organize them into photos. Anyone less than photographically inclined will still see a few interface tweaks that partly mirror the earlier iOS updates, as well as a new option to receive betas as soon as they’re posted. There’s inherent risks to using unfinished code, so take that into account before getting involved; it’s still hard to resist when Dropbox has been handing out free storage to Android device buyers like candy.

Filed under: Cellphones, Storage, Internet, Mobile

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Via: Android Police

Source: Dropbox Forums

Dropbox just released a huge update for its iOS app, and it comes with a complete redesign of the user interface, as well as the addition of a new Photos tab that comes with a timeline view of all your automatically uploaded photos and videos. They’ve also streamlined the way that you can upload files to your Dropbox from your iOS devices.

First off, Dropbox went for a more modern UI in its redesign, and everything looks a lot more flatter and square-shaped than before. This certainly isn’t a bad thing, though — it gives the app a more simpler look. However, Dropbox has stuck with their traditional blue interface, which has been around ever since its inception, and we don’t see that changing anytime soon.

The new Photos tab brings up a gallery of images that you uploaded from anywhere and lets you scroll through them and view the thumbnails. That tab, which was added earlier in the Android version, has replaced the Uploads tab, and all uploads are now done through an icon at the top of each folder.

Speaking of uploads and the new upload button, you can navigate to a specific folder and then either send files directly into it or create a new folder for the upload. The new + icon at the top of every page in the app allows you to do this, and frankly, it’s extremely nice to have that feature now, which is probably one of the greatest changes in this UI update.

Dropbox for iOS updates with complete redesign is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This week a Kickstarter project has been initiated by the name of Transporter, a device that its creators are saying is both an online yet off-cloud storage solution for personal use. If you’re a family member who wants to share massive amounts of photo and video content but you don’t want to hassle with the less-than-secure solutions out there at the moment, you’re one of the many, many different types of people who may very well benefit from the simplicity of the Transporter. This project is being worked on by several folks responsible for “designing and manufacturing products from Drobo, Handspring, Sling Media, Snap Appliance, and TiVo.”

It’s no small thing to create a solution as gigantic as this one, but if the Engineers and Operations executives in charge of this project’s former employers are any indication, we’re about to get a product that works fabulously. What you’re about to see is a really basic outline of how Transporter works as well as how the physical product looks. Mostly what you’re seeing is how the software works in its present state.

You’ve got the ability to share any type of file because this is basically a set of folders you share between your Transporter devices. You’ll see that the Transporter in the demo also has a capacity of right around 300GB (289.75GB formatted) – the final product will have many different sizes, working with Transporters and Drives, the two connected to create a full system.

In that you’ve got shared folders between devices that sync over the web, this solution is very similar to the basic idea of services like DropBox. The big difference here is that your Transporter devices are offline – you wont have any remote servers owned by companies with recurring fees appearing here. You’ll have the same files on each of your connected Transporter devices, edits and all – update a document at the office and get home to find that same document edited there.

This project has nearly 40 backers at the moment with 35 days left to go before it needs to be funded up to $100,000 USD. At the moment it’s not exactly near that goal with less than $7k, but with that amount of time left, there’s one whole heck of a good chance you’ll see these devices appearing in 2013.

Transporter Kickstarter summons Drobo engineers for offline sharing device is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.