Einige Filmstudios wollen weiter gegen VPNs vorgehen. Diese hätten eine Mitschuld an illegalem Streaming und sollen solche Seiten blocken. (VPN, Urheberrecht)
Quelle: Golem
Als Haupteigenschaft nennt Eizo den USB-Hub mit USB-C-Upstream, der den EV2485 zum Ersatz für eine Docking-Station macht. (Eizo, Display)
Quelle: Golem
Unter David Brevik, Macher von Diablo, gab es keine Toleranz gegenüber sexueller Belästigung. Blizzard ist für ihn nicht wiederzuerkennen. (Blizzard, Diablo)
Quelle: Golem
In the first part in our Simple Content Access (SCA) series, we showed how SCA and Red Hat Insights can help better manage your RHEL environments. In this part, we look at how you can use custom Insights tags to better monitor RHEL deployments.
Quelle: CloudForms
Network controls and segmentation methods allow you to control, segregate, and visualize Kubernetes traffic. These methods help you isolate tenants and better secure communications flows between containerized applications and microservices.
Quelle: CloudForms
We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.9.5 is generally available as of August 31, 2021.
Quelle: CloudForms
This month, our team released features in the block editor that give your site a little breathing room: spacing controls for buttons and paragraphs. And the List View tool keeps getting better with drag-and-drop.
Powerful Expanded Button Formatting
Buttons never looked so good with custom padding.
Padding is empty space within the border of a block, which can bring clarity to your content and adjust the balance of the page’s layout.
Custom control over a button’s spacing, color, and aggressiveness of the corner radii — all within the visual editor — can elevate it as a powerful design element of your website.
Make a punchy set of buttons themed in your brand’s colors or place an effective Call to Action button to attract your visitors.
To try, add a button with the Buttons block, and in the block’s menu go to the Dimensions section and select Padding. Adjust the padding uniformly around the button by changing the one value. If you click the unlink icon, you can adjust the four sides independently. Experiment with changing the Border and Color as well. To quickly create a grid of similar buttons, select the Options icon (…) in the toolbar above the block in your post editor and select Duplicate.
New Spacing Controls
Manually adjust the padding of other blocks as well, like a Paragraph block.
Custom-indent an entire section of text or generously pad a small amount of text for a big effect.
Experiment by wrapping a couple paragraphs with a Group block. Select the Group block and in the block’s menu go to the Dimensions section and select Padding. You can adjust the padding in this block just as you did with the button.
Drag-and-Drop for Persistent List View
We mentioned updates to the List View in June and July.
Accessible in the top-left menu of your post editor, the List View is the table of contents of all the blocks used in your post — select the diagonal hamburger icon to open this list. For deeply nested layouts, you can expand and collapse certain sections of this list, making navigation more efficient.
Now, with drag-and-drop functionality, you can reposition blocks within your post. Drag-and-drop a block within the list to reposition it, but if you prefer to organize visually, you can also drag the block’s label from the list into the post editor. List View is more powerful than ever to reorganize a post.
Keep Building, Keep Exploring
Your feedback is crucial to expanding the block editor’s capabilities, so keep it coming. Watch here for more updates, and in the meantime, go forth and create!
Quelle: RedHat Stack
Headless EcommerceIn the last couple of years there has been a shift in the way retailers approach ecommerce: where in the past development efforts were prioritized around building a solid foundation for backend transactions and operations now it is clear that companies in this space are focusing on differentiating themselves by creating unique shopping experiences that increase engagement and reduce friction. But how can development teams spend the necessary time designing and writing code for this kind of interactions while also having to seamlessly maintain ecommerce vital components like online catalogs, shopping carts and checkout payment processes? Enter headless commerce. Headless commerce (HC) helps companies of all sizes to innovate, develop and launch in less time and using fewer resources by decoupling backend and frontend. Headless solution providers empower online retailers by offering a balance between flexibility and optimization through pre-built api-accessible modules and components that can be easily plugged into their frontend architecture. This translates into rapid development while keeping desired levels of security, compliance, integration and responsiveness. This composable approach enables dev teams not only to create new features but also connect other ecommerce components with less effort which is critical when responding to business trends. But above all, the main benefit retailers receive from HC, is owning and controlling the frontend for an engaging customer journey as well as quickly launching new experiences. Google Cloud + commercetoolscommercetools, a leader in the headless commerce space, has partnered with Google Cloud to make their cloud-native SaaS platform available in the Google Cloud Marketplace. With a flexible API system (REST API and GraphQL), commercetools’ architecture has been designed to meet the needs of demanding omnichannel ecommerce projects while offering real flexibility to modify or extend its features. It supports a variety of storefront providers like Vue Storefront, offers a large set of integrations and supports microservice-based architectures. All this while providing access to multiple programming languages (PHP, JS, Java) via its SDK tools. commercetools and Google Cloud provide development teams with all the tools to build high-quality digital commerce systems. Google Cloud’s scalability, AI/ML components, API management capabilities and CI/CD tools are a perfect fit to build frontend shopping experiences that easily integrate with the commercetools stack. Developers can take advantage of this compatibility by:Integrating systems with Google’s Retail Search, Recommendations AI and Vision Product SearchInjecting serverless functions into commercetools using Google Cloud FunctionsExtending and integrating commercetools via Events handled by Pub/SubManaging 3rd party, legacy, microservices and commercetools APIs with ApigeeSelecting the Google Cloud region commercetools uses for zero latency for custom appsExpanding their microservice ecosystem with components like Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Firestore and BigQueryAdditionally, commercetools allows ecommerce solutions to tap into the wider Google Ecosystem by providing authoritative data via Merchant Center, advertising via product listing ads and selling via Google Shopping. Architecture OverviewAs mentioned previously, headless commerce is increasingly preferred by retailers who want to own and control the ‘front-end’ for providing and enabling an engaging and differentiated user and shopping experiences. The approach involves a loosely coupled architecture that separates ‘front end’ from the ‘back end’ of a digital commerce application. The front end is typically built and managed by the retailer. They want to leverage an independent software vendor (ISV) offered, ready-to-use ‘back-end’ commerce building blocks for capabilities, such as product catalog, pricing, promotions, cart, shipping, account and others.Most retailers want to invest their time and resources in building a front end that requires an agile development model to introduce new and tweaking existing user experiences to acquire and retain customers. A few retailers that do not have an in-house web development team may choose an ISV that offers ready to use front end. The front end is a web app and designed as a progressive web application (PWA) on Google Cloud. The backend is a headless commerce offered by an ISV, such as commercetools. The backend commerce capabilities are built as a set of microservices, exposed as APIs, run cloud-native and implemented as headless. It is commonly referred to as the “MACH” solution. The API-first approach of the architecture allows easily integrating ‘best of breed’ capabilities built internally and/or offered by 3rd party ISVs.Leveraging Google Cloud ComponentsThe architecture of the front end will be implemented on Google Cloud and will integrate with the ISV’s headless commerce back end that runs natively in Google Cloud. The front end will be designed using cloud-native services for PWA web app development (Google Kubernetes Engine, CI/CD services), Google Product Discovery solution that includes Retail Search and Vision API Product Search for serving product search (text and image) and Recommendations AI for serving recommendations.Storage (Cloud Storage), Database (Cloud SQL, Cloud Firestore), and edge caching for content delivery (Cloud CDN) Networking (Cloud DNS, Global Load Balancing), and Security (Cloud Armor for DDoS, API Defense for API protection) Additionally, API management (Apigee on Google Cloud) can be used to orchestrate interactions of the front end with the APIs of the backend commerce services. The API management’s capability will be used for accessing the services of on-premises systems, such as ERP, order management system (OMS), warehouse management system (WMS) as needed to support the functioning of digital commerce application. Alternatively, depending on the frontend capabilities, developers can use middleware to build custom services and route requests. What’s next?A considerable number of retailers have adopted headless commerce and are now focusing on adopting best practices and leveraging the agility that comes with this approach. Just like commercetools offers robust components that meet the retailer’s backend operational needs (Product Catalog, Order Management, Carts, Payments, etc), Google Cloud’s Compute, Networking, Severless and AI/ML services provide the agility and flexibility required by development teams to quickly and easily extend their frontend capabilities. commercetools and Google Cloud work seamlessly together because they both prioritize ease of integration, scalability, security and iterability while providing ready-to-use building blocks. It also helps that commercetools backend runs on Google Cloud. Once an initial foundation of Google Cloud and commercetools has been established, adding new commerce modules and extending functionally of the current ones becomes a straightforward process that allows to route efforts to innovation initiatives. In the end, the main beneficiaries of this technical synergy are the shoppers that enjoy experiences which increase engagement and minimize friction. Alternatively, retailers can also save time and resources by relying on frontend integrations. commercetools offers a variety of third-party solutions that can effortlessly be added to a headless commerce architecture. These integrations as well as other important headless commerce extensions will be explored in future blog entries. In the meantime, all the necessary tools to leverage headless commerce can be found in just one place: Get started with commercetools on the Google Cloud Marketplace today!Related ArticleRead Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform
You need visibility into your cloud platform in order to monitor and troubleshoot it. Network Intelligence Center provides a single console for Google Cloud network observability, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Currently Network Intelligence Center has four modules: Network Topology: Helps you visualize the network topology including VPC connectivity to on-premises, internet, and their associated metrics. Connectivity Tests: Provides both static and dynamic network connectivity tests for configuration and data-plane reachability, to verify that packets are actually getting through.Performance Dashboard: Shows packet loss and latency between zones and regions that you are using. Firewall Insights: Shows usage for your VPC firewall rules and enables you to optimize their configurationClick to enlargeNetwork TopologyNetwork Topology collects real-time telemetry and configuration data from Google infrastructure and uses it to help you visualize your resources. It captures elements such as configuration information, metrics, and logs to infer relationships between resources in a project or across multiple projects. After collecting each element, Network Topology combines them to generate a graph that represents your deployment. This enables you to quickly view the topology and analyze the performance of your deployment without configuring any agents, sorting through multiple logs, or using third-party tools. Connectivity TestsThe Connectivity Tests diagnostics tool lets you check connectivity between endpoints in your network. It analyzes your configuration and in some cases performs run-time verification.To analyze network configurations, Connectivity Tests simulates the expected inbound and outbound forwarding path of a packet to and from your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network, Cloud VPN tunnels, or VLAN attachments. For some connectivity scenarios, Connectivity Tests also performs run-time verification where it sends packets over the data plane to validate connectivity and provides baseline diagnostics of latency and packet loss. Performance DashboardPerformance Dashboard gives you visibility into the network performance of the entire Google Cloud network, as well as the performance of your project’s resources. It collects and shows packet loss and latency metrics. With these performance-monitoring capabilities, you can distinguish between a problem in your application and a problem in the underlying Google Cloud network. You can also debug historical network performance problems.Firewall InsightsFirewall Insights enables you to better understand and safely optimize your firewall configurations. It provides reports that contain information about firewall usage and the impact of various firewall rules on your VPC network. For a more in-depth look into Network Intelligence Center check out the documentation.For more #GCPSketchnote, follow the GitHub repo. For similar cloud content follow me on Twitter @pvergadia and keep an eye out on thecloudgirl.dev
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform
Editor’s note: In this blog, we look at how TIM Group, a leading information and communication technology (ICT) company in Italy and Brazil, used Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL to deliver a new billing application and saw 45% savings in database maintenance and infrastructure costs.In early 2020, TIM Group set out to solve a common challenge faced by large enterprises in order to keep up with competitive trends and new technological developments. One of our core IT systems, our billing function, was in need of a modernization overhaul and so we began a digital transformation project to build a new billing system on Google Cloud powered by Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL and Google Compute Engine. The new system was designed to automate important billing and credit systems that had been previously processed manually, and has already resulted in a 45% cost savings in database management, and a 20% savings in infrastructure costs. Designing a new digital journey My team is responsible for the development and maintenance of new billing systems for wholesale network access services. We began building a new system in 2020 that would modernize the way we bill for our B2B services with other telecom operators in the wholesale market, which in terms of revenue is an enormous market segment for TIM Group. The new billing system will help us to automate the formerly manual business processes for billing and credit management, and will eventually allow our IT department to decommission 16 legacy on-premise systems. Some of these legacy systems are 20 years old and no longer supported by the application stack. They suffer from poor performance, storage scalability limitations, low availability, and a lack of disaster recovery capabilities. In addition, they incur huge maintenance costs across applications and infrastructure levels, and they have no support for future use cases or innovation. Benchmarking Cloud SQL for a new billing systemWe initially started this project with a different planned architecture than the one we ended up building. At the outset, we had a blueprint architecture based on an Oracle database, and we acquired a license of a billing product called Wholesale Business Revenue Management (WBRM) from Zira to configure and customize as a base for our new billing system, compatible with both Oracle and PostgreSQL databases. Ultimately, we were designing a solution to run in our data centers based on VMware and Oracle, and a couple of months into the project we signed the partnership with Google Cloud. This decision opened up the possibility of running solutions on a modern cloud environment. We were excited by many of the capabilities we saw in Google Cloud’s solutions, including Cloud SQL, their fully managed relational database service for running MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server. We tested the performance of Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL to see if it was comparable with the benchmark that Zira gave us for running WBRM on Oracle.The results were excellent; Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL met the Oracle database benchmark that Zira had given us based on previous stress tests. Using a database like Postgres would allow us to save on licensing costs and the contracting process with Oracle. To conduct these tests, we wanted to compare Oracle RAC against Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, and look at which performed better in terms of application performance, scalability and ease of maintenance. We started with vertical scalability. We incremented the virtual CPUs and RAM by 20% and got a proportional benefit in throughput. We then tested horizontally scaled read workload and found that we had the same performance in user interface response time when linked to a read replica of a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL database. We tested availability by switching down a node on the database, and found that all services were redirected to the follower node of the database with zero downtime. We were satisfied and encouraged by the results of these tests, and proceeded to build our new billing system with WBRM and Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL.Cutting database maintenance costs by up to 45%The managed services of Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL have given us considerable operational benefits. We were relying on external suppliers to handle most of our database maintenance, including updates, patching, security, and more administrative tasks. We saw 45% savings in eliminating that cost, and an additional 20% savings in infrastructure costs, which is a conservative estimate since we’re still in the process of fully rolling out the new system. We expect even bigger savings by the end of the project, which will hopefully go fully live at the end of 2021. Our project strategy has been to implement the new system in increments, replacing one service at a time. We started with services that weren’t supported by our legacy system, which included manual billing and credit processes that previously required 20-30 team members to maintain. As our year continues, we will continue work to dismiss legacy systems and to feed the new system with traffic usage, where we expect a huge ramp up of volume. Peeking under the hoodOur cloud instances are located primarily in the Netherlands region, with virtual machines in zones a and b for high availability. We have a highly available Cloud SQL instance across those zones. In zone c, we also have a read replica that we use to offload workloads from the primary that require read access only. For example, some departments have revenue assurance systems that connect to this read replica to check on orders billed or any revenue problems. On-premises, adding a new read replica server to the database can take two to three months, as it requires hardware allocation, tickets etc. In the cloud we can set up a read replica in a matter of minutes.For disaster recovery purposes, we make a daily backup with a 14 day retention period, and we have another operations team that is in charge of taking snapshots of our Zira VMs.Below, you can see our high level architecture. The application itself is hosted on Compute Engine and can be accessed through a load balancer. You can also see Cloud SQL and the read replicas in every zone and region mentioned above.Cloud SQL as part of the Zira WBRM architecture at TIM GroupTwo of our requirements were to direct some of the read traffic to the read replica and also to pool connections together. To meet those requirements, we have deployed PgBouncer which takes care of diverting the traffic and pgpool that takes care of connection pooling in front of Cloud SQL, as you can see in the diagram below.With Cloud SQL powering our new billing system, we can now automate previous manual billing and credit processing, dismiss over a dozen legacy systems, and build upon technology that provides high performance, easy storage scalability, high availability, and disaster recovery. And this is all at significant cost savings in database maintenance and infrastructure. In addition, we now have a database solution that integrates easily with other services like WBRM, and will empower TIM Group to innovate for use cases on our roadmap and beyond.Read more about TIM Group, Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL and Wholesale Business Revenue Management (WBRM) from Zira.Related ArticleIntroducing cross-region replica for Cloud SQLCross-region replication from Cloud SQL lets you ensure business continuity across Google Cloud regions in case of an outage or failure.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform
