The HostAdvice blog presents the finest and most valuable tips, tools and ideas for small business owners, start-up’s and entrepreneurs.

Cloudflare Launches Domain Name Registration Service with Guaranteed Wholesale Pricing on TLDs

Written by: , Sep. 28, 2018
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Commodity Approach to DNS Servers & Ultra High End Security Options for Domain Names

Cloudflare announced this week that the company will begin operating services as a domain name registrar in late 2018 with a wholesale price guarantee to customers to take no commission on sales. In a radical press release, Matthew Prince stated that the current domain name registration system is "crazy... messed up" and "as nutty to us as certificate authorities charging to run a bit of math." Prince writes that Cloudflare views the current domain name registry system as a broken market, mostly dominated by middle-ware companies with up-sell offers that are adding little value to the supply chain. Worse, domain name registrars make businesses reliant on the host company's security policies, creating a potential link in the web hosting chain that hackers can exploit for access or control to websites. Prince revealed that Cloudflare almost lost control of their own domain names to hackers through a registrar company, where the new service includes "ultra high end" security that can be as advanced as having multiple people required to verify DNS changes for a domain for the configuration to be saved. Cloudflare now has security features for domain name registration & DNS servers that are beyond what any other company on the market offers, although the new service is still invite-only. Combined with Cloudflare's CDN, Edge server, & anti-DDoS security products, as well as weakness in competitors in the sector, the new Cloudflare domain registration platform looks poised to become very successful, with Namecheap, GoDaddy, Enom, etc. potentially losing profit & customers to the venture-funded ($182 million USD) start-up platform.

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MariaDB Acquires Clustrix: MySQL-Compatible OLTP Database with NoSQL Performance

Written by: , Sep. 25, 2018
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ClustrixDB Scales High-Traffic MySQL Apps in Production on Public/Private Cloud Web Servers

MariaDB was launched in 2009 by the original founders of MySQL after Oracle legally acquired formal ownership of the popular open source database platform. This week, MariaDB announced the acquisition of Clustrix, a twelve year old start-up company that develops a drop-in replacement for MySQL databases designed for better performance at scale in demanding high-traffic cloud environments. The ClustrixDB is already used by enterprise data centers in support of over 100,000 transactions per second for ecommerce. Programmers from the company will be integrating the code & features from the ClustrixDB framework into new releases of MariaDB. Enterprise data centers operating websites for the world's largest brands already doubt the reliability of MySQL in production for their website & mobile app transaction requirements at max scale. With Clustrix, MariaDB will also be able to offer better support for MySQL apps in containers on public cloud hosts with faster performance speeds. ClustrixDB includes the ability for users to choose either to shard databases into synched versions across multiple web servers for "big data" applications or to scale tables horizontally without sharding. ACID compliance allows MariaDB to challenge the performance speeds of Hadoop, Redis, & NoSQL solutions for "big data" requirements with the advantages of drop-in MySQL compatibility for code. Although financial details of the MariaDB-Clustrix deal were not disclosed, TechCrunch reports that Clustrix previously received $72 million in VC funding compared to around $100 million for MariaDB. ServiceNow will be partnering with MariaDB on the financial terms of agreement. MariaDB is gaining huge traction over MySQL in professional CMS development.

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The Three Pillars of GitOps: Pipelines, Observability, & Source Control

Written by: , Sep. 24, 2018
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Weaveworks Cloud & Flux - Git Version Control for Automated Kubernetes Web Server Configuration

According to Alexis Richardson, co-founder/CEO of Weaveworks, and William Denniss, project manager at Google Cloud Platform, GitOps are "modern best practices for high velocity app development using cloud native tools." With GitOps, web server configuration is regarded as code and subject to version control, where Git operates "as a single source of truth for the whole system." GitOps depends on completely automated software delivery pipelines, with 24/7 monitoring and observability "baked into the beginning," where data security is of "critical importance. Everything has to be version controlled and stored in a single source of truth from which you can recover." In Agile development teams, Terraform, Spinnaker, Puppet, & Ansible are currently popular for web server script automation using Git for disk image prints with Docker & Kubernetes on public cloud hosts for CI/CD requirements in project management. Weaveworks has developed a number of cloud platforms that address the software development & web server hosting pipeline holistically such as Weave Cloud, Weave Flux, and integrated AWS container management products. GitOps allows developers to make hundreds of small changes per day to running websites & mobile applications in live production rather than rolling out monolithic upgrades. YAML is used to build declarative infrastructure statements that can be repeated and implemented as standards for cloud network automation. In GitOps, diff alerts & pull requests are managed through decentralized networks of programmers in Agile teams from any office location using Git, increasing management flexibility in hiring and worker productivity times. GitOps has now become standard in web/mobile app development for enterprise corporations, start-up companies, non-profits, government agencies, & SMEs worldwide.

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FutureStack 2018: New Relic Cloud-Native Monitoring Tools for Kubernetes, Docker, & Microservices

Written by: , Sep. 23, 2018
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Monitoring, Visibility, & Metrics for DevOps - Improved Production Efficiency for Web/Mobile Apps

New Relic is a cloud software analytics company founded in 2008 by Lew Cirne. New Relic raised $214 million in venture capital funding before going public with an IPO in 2014. Now listed on the New York Stock Exchange ($NEWR), the company has a valuation of $5.4 billion USD. The New Relic network monitoring tools for data centers and web/mobile software applications in production have been widely adopted as enterprise solutions. Each year the company holds a FutureStack conference for programmers, developers, & ecosystem companies to present seminars on various technical issues or announce new product releases. At the FutureStack 2018 convention in SF, Cirne noted that 50% of global GDP will be digitized by 2021, representing a total of $52 trillion USD which "drives world's brightest minds to focus on the problem." The question for enterprise corporations is how to move faster and accelerate the future. The solution New Relic is promoting is based in the use of Microservices, Kubernetes, & Docker containers. New Relic has 50 Agile teams with over 400+ programmers working on building new software for monitoring, visibility, & metrics, as well as enabling devops teams to automate repetitive tasks. The key to this is New Relic's "Four Pillars of an Observability Platform," where cloud metrics, network routing, & data analytics software must all be "Application Centric, Cloud Native, Intelligent, & Programmable." Cirne announced new tools for programmers and systems administrators at FutureStack 2018, including distributed tracing, the Elixir agent for APM, Kubernetes monitoring, & GraphQL API support. The FutureStack 2018 keynote address also included featured showcase presentations from major New Relic partners IBM & USA Today using the software at scale with thousands of active elastic cluster node servers.

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