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Business disruptions, tactical pivots, and remote work have all emphasized the critical role that analytics plays in all organizations. Uncharted situations demand proven performance insights so that businesses can quickly determine what is and is not working. In recent months, the urgency for business-guiding insights has only been heightened, leading to a need for real-time analytics solutions. Equally important is the need to discover and share these insights in the most cost-effective manner.

Not only has COVID-19 been a challenge to world health but also has created new economic challenges to businesses worldwide. These challenges have resulted in an increased need for tools that quickly deliver insights to business leaders—empowering informed decisions. This is where Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics can help.

New circumstances demand new solutions

Azure Synapse Analytics is a new type of analytics platform that enables you to accelerate your time-to-insight with a unified experience and—just as important—save on costs while doing so. It is up to 14 times faster and costs 94 percent less than other cloud providers. Let’s dive into how Azure Synapse can help you respond, adapt, and save.

Respond to disruption and adapt to a new normal

History shows that proven analytics technologies, such as Azure Synapse, have a strong track record of enabling more dynamic and exploratory responses that can guide businesses through difficult times. Traditional data warehouses and reports can’t scale to provide the intelligence and insight that business executives demand in today’s world.

To make good strategic decisions, businesses need to quickly and effectively find new insights in their data. This can only come through more advanced tools and an improved understanding of how to get the most from them.

Each recent global economic crisis can be correlated with a follow-up increase in data analytics projects as companies worldwide lean on data analytics to boost their recovery.

To enable teams to collaborate and innovate, they need tools and services that help them discover, explore, and quickly and efficiently find new insights.

Azure Synapse has an intelligent architecture that makes it industry-leading in unifying big data workloads with traditional data warehousing while at the same time encouraging collaboration and reducing costs.

Using Azure Synapse, businesses can empower their teams to collaborate, adapt, and create new strategies that are driven by data. Azure Synapse not only makes it easy to start and scale in the cloud, but it has key security, governance, and monitoring tools that are critical for successful data analytics solutions.

Save on costs with Azure Synapse

The current economic challenges have certainly made us all—individuals and businesses—more conscious of our spending. Businesses are looking for new ways to improve productivity and efficiency on limited budgets. Cloud analytics in general, and Azure Synapse in particular, are a great fit for this requirement because it helps businesses start small and scale as needed.

Azure Synapse offers a cost-effective service due to its intelligent architecture, which separates storage, compute power, and resources—but makes them seamlessly available when needed. This means that you do not have to keep paying for cloud services if you experience unexpected events that cause business disruptions and tactical pivots. Services can simply be paused to release resources and save costs. You can also scale compute separately from storage, which brings even more cost savings.

Azure Synapse has been found to offer a significantly better price-to-performance ratio when compared with similar services from other cloud providers. This chart from an independent study shows the price-performance comparison (lower is better).

In a recent study, GigaOm, an independent emerging technology research firm, found that Azure Synapse has the best price-to-performance ratio on the market. The study surveyed many services from all of the major cloud providers and took both performance and cost into account. Besides being powerful and cost-effective, Azure Synapse offers industry-leading features when it comes to governance, monitoring, and collaboration that address key challenges for data analytics projects. These features provide businesses with the right tools to control not only costs but also the entire analytics lifecycle, including security, performance, and accuracy.

Learn more

Great leadership, a clear vision, and intelligent data analytics are key components that can help during significant economic and health challenges. Business leaders must lean on the data and insights available and the will, knowledge, and skills of their teams. Empowering your team with the right tools is critical to ensuring they have what they need to effectively collaborate, discover, and work towards recovery.

To learn more about Azure Synapse:

Read the e-book Three Ways Analytics Can Help: Respond, Adapt, and Save.
Get started on Azure Synapse Analytics with an Azure account.
Visit the Azure Synapse documentation webpage for tutorials.
Request a call from an Azure Synapse sales specialist when you’re ready.

Quelle: Azure

25. August 2020

da Agency

Power mission-critical applications with Azure Database for PostgreSQL

In our current environment, organizations are increasingly looking towards digital solutions to engage their customers and remain competitive. They’re discovering that their customers’ needs can be best met through differentiated, digital experiences delivered by cloud-native applications.

When building a new application, one of the most important decisions to make is where to store the application data. We see tremendous interest in Azure Database for PostgreSQL when it comes to storing relational data in the cloud for mission-critical applications. Here’s why:

Why Azure Database for PostgreSQL?

100 percent open source.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL is built on community edition Postgres, with open extension support so you can leverage valuable PostgreSQL features, including JSONB, geospatial support, and rich indexing.
Our Postgres team at Microsoft is committed to nurturing a culture of contributing to and collaborating with the Postgres community, and we’re excited to welcome Postgres committers to the team. These committers review submitted code for Postgres, “commit” it into the source code repository, and work with other contributors to test, refine, and eventually incorporate it into the next Postgres build. In future blogs, they’ll share what they’re working on when it comes to new versions of Postgres and updates to the Citus open source extension.

Fully managed.

Using a managed Postgres database service on Azure makes your job simpler and allows you to focus on your application, by automating time- and cost-intensive tasks like configuring and managing high-availability, disaster recovery, backups, and data replication across regions.
Azure Database for PostgreSQL has enterprise-grade security and compliance capabilities, such as Azure Advanced Threat Protection, and provides customized performance recommendations, making it suitable for your most mission-critical applications.

High-performance horizontal scaling.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale (Citus) scales out horizontally to hundreds of nodes, with no application rewrites, so you can easily build incredibly scalable applications. This is done using the Citus open source Postgres extension that intelligently and transparently distributes your data and queries across multiple nodes to achieve massive parallelism, along with a much bigger compute, memory, and disk footprint.
In future blogs, we’ll dive deeper into key use cases for Hyperscale (Citus) and share how organizations are building powerful applications using these capabilities. Hyperscale (Citus) enables organizations to scale multi-tenant SaaS applications, build high throughput transactional applications, and more.

Key considerations for running modern enterprise applications on Postgres

If you’re new to the world of Postgres and want to understand whether it’s a good fit for building your enterprise applications, check out our new whitepaper, Running Enterprise Applications on PostgreSQL, to learn about:

Benefits of using Postgres for modern, mission-critical applications, and considerations around performance, scalability, security, and more.
Postgres’ extensible design that enables you to future-proof your applications.
Postgres capabilities that empower developers to work more productively.

Announcing our Postgres blog series

We are here to help you at every stage of your journey with Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and will be keeping you up to date with regular posts both here and on our Azure Database for PostgreSQL blog. We’ll be sharing:

Insights and updates directly from Postgres committers Thomas Munro, Jeff Davis, Andres Freund, and David Rowley—you can read the first post in the series, How to securely authenticate with SCRAM in Postgres 13, now.
Key customer use cases, stories, and architectures.
Resources and best practices to help you develop innovative applications to solve business challenges.

Whether you’re new to Postgres, new to Azure, or are already using Azure Database for PostgreSQL to power your enterprise applications, we look forward to supporting your application development journey.

Stay tuned for future blogs here and subscribe to our Azure Database for PostgreSQL blog.

Learn more about Azure Database for PostgreSQL.
Quelle: Azure

25. August 2020

da Agency

Scaling Docker’s Business to Serve Millions More Developers: Storage

At Docker, our mission is to enable developers worldwide to quickly bring their ideas to life by reducing the complexity of application development. While over 6.5 million registered Docker developers are enjoying the benefits of Docker today, we want to scale Docker’s business to the tens of millions of developers who are just discovering Docker. Offering free tools and services is a cornerstone of our mission, and these are funded by our paid subscription services.

In this blog series, we will deep dive into why and how the recently announced Terms of Service changes were introduced. This blog, Part 1, will explore the inactive image retention policy and how it will impact development teams who use Docker Hub for managing their container images. Part 2 will focus on the new rate limits policies that were introduced for image pulls.

A deeper look at Docker Hub images

Delivering containerized applications in a portable, secure, and resource efficient manner also requires tools and services for securely storing and sharing applications with your development team. Today, Docker is proud to offer the world’s largest container registry, Docker Hub, which is used by over 6.5 million developers around the world. Over 15 PB of container images are stored on Docker Hub today, spanning everything from the world’s most popular in-memory databases to event streaming platforms, to highly curated and trusted Docker Official Images, and to the 150 million images created by the Docker community.

Docker’s internal analytics tools have shown that of the 15PB of images stored in Docker Hub, over 10PB of these images have not been accessed for more than 6 months. Digging a little deeper, we found that over 4.5PB of these inactive images are associated with free accounts. Many of these images were only being used for a short period of time, including images that resulted from CI pipelines configured with Docker Hub where the deletion of these ephemeral images was often overlooked.

With an enormous footprint of inactive data sitting idle in Docker Hub, the team was faced with a difficult question – how do we limit the amount of inactive data that Docker is incurring storage charges for on a monthly basis, while not impacting the overall Docker customer experience?

The guiding principles for addressing this challenge were two-fold:

Continue to offer a compelling suite of free-to-use Docker tools and services that developers – including open source projects – can use to build, share, and run applications.Ensure Docker can scale to satisfy the demand of new developers by limiting the currently unbounded storage costs – one of the largest operating expenses for Docker Hub.

Helping developers manage inactive images

To help Docker economically scale its infrastructure to support free services for our growing base of users, several updates were announced. First, a new inactive image retention policy was introduced that will automatically delete images hosted in free accounts that have not been used in 6 months. In addition, Docker will also be providing tooling, in the form of a UI and APIs, that will allow users to more easily manage their images. Together, these changes will allow developers to more easily clean up their inactive images and also ensure Docker can economically scale its infrastructure.

With this new policy, starting on November 1, images stored in free Docker Hub repositories that have not had their manifest pushed or pulled in the last 6 months will be removed. This policy does not apply to images stored by paid Docker Hub subscription accounts, Docker Verified Publishers , or Docker Official Images.

Example #1: Molly, a free Docker Hub user, pushed a tagged image molly/hello-world:v1 to Docker Hub on January 1, 2019. The image was never pulled since it was pushed. This tagged image will be considered inactive beginning November 1, 2020 when the new policy takes effect. The image and any tag pointing to hit, will be subject to deletion on November 1, 2020.

Example #2: Molly has another untagged image molly/myapp@sha256:c0ffee that was first pushed on January 1, 2018. This image was last pulled on August 1, 2020. This image will be considered an active image and will not be subject to deletion on November 1, 2020.

Minimizing impact to the developer community

For free accounts, Docker offers free retention of images inactive for six months. For users that need their inactive images to be retained, Docker also offers unlimited image retention as a feature of the Pro and Team plans. Visit www.docker.com/pricing to view the available plans.

In addition, Docker will be offering a set of tools and services to help developers easily view and manage their images, including the following product updates which will be made available on Docker Hub in the coming months:

Image management dashboard to view and manage images across all repositories within a namespace (roadmap issue #146)Email notifications for images that are set to expire (roadmap issue #147)Restoration of recently deleted images (roadmap issue #148)

Finally, as part of Docker’s commitment to the open source community, before November 1 we will be announcing availability of new open source plans. To apply for an open source plan, please complete the short form here.

For more information regarding the recent terms of service changes, please refer to the FAQ.

Stay tuned for email communications regarding any upcoming expiring images in your account or sign up for a Pro or Team plan for unlimited inactive image retention.

While we tried to minimize the impact on developers, it’s possible you have questions or use cases that are not covered. As always, we welcome your questions and feedback at pricingquestions@docker.com.
The post Scaling Docker’s Business to Serve Millions More Developers: Storage appeared first on Docker Blog.
Quelle: https://blog.docker.com/feed/

25. August 2020

da Agency

Scaling Docker to Serve Millions More Developers: Network Egress

In Part 1 of this blog we went into a deep dive that analyzed all of the images stored in Docker Hub, the world’s largest container registry. We did this to give you a better understanding of how our new Terms of Service updates will impact development teams who use Docker Hub to manage their container images and CI/CD pipelines.

Part 2 of this blog post takes a deep dive into rate limits for container image pulls. This was also announced as part of our updated Docker Terms of Service (ToS) communications. We detailed the following pull rate limits to Docker subscription plans that will take effect November 1, 2020:

Free plan – anonymous users: 100 pulls per 6 hours Free plan – authenticated users: 200 pulls per 6 hoursPro plan – unlimitedTeam plan – unlimited

Docker defines pull rate limits as the number of manifest requests to Docker Hub. Rate limits for Docker image pulls are based on the account type of the user requesting the image – not the account type of the image’s owner. For anonymous (unauthenticated) users, pull rates are limited based on the individual IP address.

We’ve been getting questions from customers and the community regarding container image layers. We are not counting image layers as part of the pull rate limits. Because we are limiting on manifest requests, the number of layers (blob requests) related to a pull is unlimited at this time. This is a change based on community feedback in order to be more user-friendly, so users do not need to count layers on each image they may be using.

A deeper look at Docker Hub pull rates

In determining why rate limits were necessary and how to apply them, we spent considerable time analyzing image downloads from Docker Hub. What we found confirmed that the vast majority of Docker users pulled images at a rate you would expect for normal workflows. However, there is an outsized impact from a small number of anonymous users. For example, roughly 30% of all downloads on Hub come from only 1% of our anonymous users.

The new pull limits are based on this analysis, such that most of our users will not be impacted. These limits are designed to accommodate normal use cases for developers – learning Docker, developing code, building images, and so forth.

Helping developers understand pull rate limits

Now that we understood the impact and where the limits should land, we needed to define at a technical level how these limits should work. Limiting image pulls to a Docker registry is complicated. You won’t find a pull API in the registry specification – it doesn’t exist. In fact, an image pull is actually a combination of manifest and blob API requests, and these are done in different patterns depending on the client state and the image in question.

For example, if you already have the image, the Docker Engine client will issue a manifest request, realize it has all of the referenced layers based on the returned manifest, and stop. On the other hand, if you are pulling an image that supports multiple architectures, a manifest request will be issued and return a list of image manifests for each supported architecture. The Docker Engine will then issue another specific manifest request for the architecture it’s running on, and receive a list of all the layers in that image. Finally, it will request each layer (blob) it is missing.

So an image pull is actually one or two manifest requests, and zero to infinite blob (layer) requests. Historically, Docker monitored rate limits based on blobs (layers). This was because a blob most closely correlated with bandwidth usage. However, we listened to feedback from the community that this is difficult to track, leads to an inconsistent experience depending on how many layers the image you are pulling has, discourages good Dockerfile practices, and is not intuitive for users who just want to get stuff done without being experts on Docker images and registries.

As such, we are rate limiting based on manifest requests moving forward. This has the advantage of being more directly coupled with a pull, so it is easy for users to understand. There is a small tradeoff – if you pull an image you already have, this is still counted even if you don’t download the layers. Overall, we hope this method of rate limiting is both fair and user-friendly.

We welcome your feedback

We will be monitoring and adjusting these limits over time based on common use cases to make sure the limits are appropriate for each tier of user, and in particular, that we are never blocking developers from getting work done.

Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a blog post about configuring CI and production systems in light of these changes.

For more information regarding the recent terms of service changes, please refer to the FAQ.

For users that need higher image pull limits, Docker also offers unlimited image pull as a feature of the Pro and Team plans. Visit www.docker.com/pricing to view the available plans.As always, we welcome your questions and feedback at pricingquestions@docker.com.
The post Scaling Docker to Serve Millions More Developers: Network Egress appeared first on Docker Blog.
Quelle: https://blog.docker.com/feed/