Rackspace Australia expands main bit barn, adds DR site

Chinese web giant Tencent has revealed it’s completed a massive migration of its own apps to its own cloud.

The company started thinking about this in 2018 after realising that its many services had each built their own technology silos.

Plenty of those services – among them WeChat, social network, qq.com, games like Honour of Kings and YouTube-like Tencent Video – have tens or hundreds of millions of users. Each service appears to have built infrastructure to cope with peak traffic requirements, leaving plenty of unused capacity across Tencent’s operations.

D-Wave Systems has put its next-generation Advantage2 quantum computer into the cloud, or at least some form of it.

This experimental machine will be accessible from D-Wave's Leap online service, we're told. We first learned of the experimental system last year when the biz revealed its Clarity Roadmap, which includes plans for a gate-model quantum system. Advantage2 sports D-Wave's latest topology and qubit design that apparently increases connectivity and aims to deliver greater performance by reducing noise.

"By making the Advantage2 prototype available in the Leap quantum cloud service today, the company is providing an early snapshot for exploration and learning by developers and researchers," D-Wave said in a canned statement.

A former Maryland Cabinet-level official and a former IT executive have pleaded guilty to involvement in a bribery and extortion scheme related to technology contracts about a decade ago.

According to the US Attorney's Office of the State of Maryland, Isabel FitzGerald, 52, of Annapolis, Maryland, and Kenneth Coffland, 67, of Riva, Maryland, pleaded guilty last week to charges of bribery and extortion, respectively. They were indicted in 2017.

From 2009 through September 2011, Coffland worked [PDF] at ACS, which held a $129 million IT hosting contract and $229 million applications contract with the State of Maryland Department of Human Resources (DHR). ACS, acquired by Xerox in 2010, managed the datacenter that hosted DHR applications for administering welfare benefits under federal and state programs.

Cloudflare said it this month staved off another record-breaking HTTPS-based distributed denial-of-service attack, this one significantly larger than the previous largest DDoS attack that occurred only two months ago.

In April, the biz said it mitigated an HTTPS DDoS attack that reached a peak of 15.3 million requests-per-second (rps). The flood last week hit a peak of 26 million rps, with the target being the website of a company using Cloudflare's free plan, according to Omer Yoachimik, product manager at Cloudflare.

Like the attack in April, the most recent one not only was unusual because of its size, but also because it involved using junk HTTPS requests to overwhelm a website, preventing it from servicing legit visitors and thus effectively falling off the 'net.

Oracle has impressed the markets with strong revenue growth for cloud infrastructure and applications-as-a-service.

However, Oracle is still struggling to gain a larger share of the global cloud market, where it lags behind AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Big Red's total revenue for Q4, which ended May 31, hit $11.8 billion, up 5 per cent on the same period a year ago. Total cloud revenue, including infrastructure and software-as-a-service, reached $2.9 billion, up 19 percent. Cloud ERP Fusion revenue increased 20 percent while NetSuite ERP cloud revenue grew 27 per cent.

Oracle is planning to build a national database of individuals' health records for the whole United States following its $28.3 billion acquisition of electronic health records specialist Cerner.

In a presentation, CTO and founder Larry Ellison said electronic health records for individual patients were stored by hospitals and physicians, and not replicated or shared between providers.

"We're going to solve this problem by putting a unified national health records database on top of all of these thousands of separate hospital databases," Ellison said.

AWS is trying to help organizations migrate their mainframe-based workloads to the cloud and potentially transform them into modern cloud-native services.

The Mainframe Modernization initiative was unveiled at the cloud giant's Re:Invent conference at the end of last year, where CEO Adam Selipsky claimed that "customers are trying to get off their mainframes as fast as they can."

Whether this is based in reality or not, AWS concedes that such a migration will inevitably involve the customer going through a lengthy and complex process that requires multiple steps to discover, assess, test, and operate the new workload environments.

Google has put its cloud to work calculating the value of Pi all the way out to 100 trillion digits, and claimed that's a world record for Pi-crunching.

The ad giant and cloud contender has detailed the feat, revealing that the job ran for 157 days, 23 hours, 31 minutes and 7.651 seconds.

A program called y-cruncher by Alexander J. Yee did the heavy lifting, running on a n2-highmem-128 instance running Debian Linux and employing 128 vCPUs, 864GB of memory, and accessing 100Gbit/sec egress bandwidth. Google created a networked storage cluster, because the n2-highmem-128 maxes out at 257TB of attached storage for a single VM and the job needed at least 554TB of temporary storage.

Infrastructure operators are struggling to reduce the rate of IT outages despite improving technology and strong investment in this area.

The Uptime Institute's 2022 Outage Analysis Report says that progress toward reducing downtime has been mixed. Investment in cloud technologies and distributed resiliency has helped to reduce the impact of site-level failures, for example, but has also added complexity. A growing number of incidents are being attributed to network, software or systems issues because of this intricacy.

The authors make it clear that critical IT systems are far more reliable than they once were, thanks to many decades of improvement. However, data covering 2021 and 2022 indicates that unscheduled downtime is continuing at a rate that is not significantly reduced from previous years.

OpenInfra Summit The OpenInfra Foundation kicked off its first in-person conference in over two years with acknowledgement that European cloud providers must use the current window of opportunity for digital sovereignty.

This is before the US-headquartered hyperscalers shut down that opening salvo with their own initiatives aimed at satisfying regulator European Union, as Microsoft recently did – with President Brad Smith leading a charm offensive.

Around one thousand delegates turned out for the Berlin shindig, markedly fewer than at CNCF's Kubecon in Valencia a few weeks earlier. Chief operating officer Mark Collier took to the stage to remind attendees that AWS' CEO noted as recently as this April that 95 per cent of the world's IT was not spent in the cloud, but on on-premises IT.