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

Varnish Cache: Accelerated HTTP(S) Cache Control with Hitch TLS & VMSE Data Services

Written by: , Mar. 18, 2018
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Varnish HTTP Cache Control with Improved SSL/TLS Management for Web Servers

Varnish Cache is used by over 2.5 million websites in production in 2018, including by some of the largest IT & media corporations like Twitter, NYT, Wikipedia, Guardian.uk, Facebook, & Vimeo. Varnish Cache is a reverse-proxy HTTP cloud load balancing software that can speed up website content delivery to browsers through page load request processing on the same hardware by 300 to 1000 times. Varnish Cache accomplishes these web server performance improvements through better repeat request file caching on network I/O transfers, where Hitch can be used for more efficient encryption connection management & control at scale for web servers running under https with SSL/TLS certificates. Varnish Cache supports Apache & NGINX web servers and installs on either Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, & CentOS) or FreeBSD to operate. Drupal, WordPress, Magento, and other CMS website publishers can directly integrate Varnish Cache with their web page content management system and secure better performance with support for web traffic on hardware in the ongoing maintenance of cloud apps for business, government, or media organizations. Varnish Cache has open source versions, cloud licensed, and enterprise licensed products available depending on the web hosting traffic volume or data center size.

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NetCraft: NGINX Manages 26% of Popular Website Traffic, Cloudflare CDN Servers Support 5.2% in 2018

Written by: , Mar. 17, 2018
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NGINX Compatible With Windows, Linux, macOS, Solaris, or FreeBSD Web Servers

NetCraft is considered a reliable source for web server operating system analysis based on their method of parsing the HTTP meta-tag values of the top 1 million websites in the world by the measure of total user traffic. The NetCraft report for February of 2018 shows use of the NGINX web servers at 25.9% of the market surveyed, which was down 4.6% from the previous month due to the way that the Cloudflare CDN service codes output pages on client websites. The launch of a new Cloudflare server category follows the introduction of a change in HTTP response header encoding by the company. Previously Cloudflare content carried a "Server: cloudflare-nginx" meta-tag value, which is now being replaced by the HTTP response tag "Server: cloudflare" published on hosted CDN content. From this it is suggested that 4.5% to 5.2% of all NGINX web server traffic was running on the Cloudflare CDN data center architecture internationally during or before February 2018. Overall, Apache has 36.8% of the web server market, NGINX web servers (including Cloudflare CDN) powered around 31% of the top 1 million websites, while Microsoft Windows solutions accounted for 9.4% of web traffic volume, and LiteSpeed web servers represented 1.4% of total IT hardware deployments. These figures give an accurate portrait of resource allocation in web hosting internationally or the configurations actively in use that support the top 1 million websites from a variety of third-party service providers or private cloud solutions in enterprise companies and software start-ups. NGINX Plus is a licensed distribution of the web server framework with better cloud network load balancing and optimized content cache systems for managed website hosting. NGINX Controller provides advanced network monitoring and data analytics tools to online businesses. Both the open source version of NGINX and NGINX Plus are supported by AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and the other major public cloud companies, while the web server changes at Cloudflare CDN consolidate huge global scale through their 127+ international data centers and client base.

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DevOps Toolbox: Jenkins, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Vagrant, & SaltStack

Written by: , Mar. 16, 2018
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Jira, Confluence, Trello, CloudApp, Zoom, & Slack - Top 12 DevOps Apps for 2018

DevOps represents the best practices in project management for the development & operation of web/mobile applications in a public, private, or hybrid cloud hosting environment. The main requirement of DevOps is the synchronization of code changes from remote team members through version control standards in programming or maintaining web/mobile SaaS applications in production. A complimentary aspect is the provisioning of full-stack web server software packages for virtualization frameworks in cloud hosting. DevOps software can automate web server provisioning using Git and remote disk image repositories on cloud data center hardware. Containers, VPS, & VM standards have proliferated, where programming teams now support a wider range of languages, databases, APIs, & platform integration requirements. Open source and proprietary cloud software solutions compete for users between large companies, independent web publishers, programmers, and developers. DevOps is based on the best practices from academic computing and CS research departments in creating new code on open source standards, as well as Fortune 500 IT companies which establish working solutions for project management tool integration, web server configurations, & internet programming standards. DevOps tools largely rely on the use of Git for version control in software development between distributed teams of programmers with coding & sandbox environments synchronized on local machines to remote production hardware in the cloud. Containers, VPS, VMs, & elastic servers are all used in production operations for a large number of web/mobile apps which require support for auto-configuration of node clusters in cloud networks. Docker Swarm, Rancher, OpenStack, CoreOS, & Kubernetes are the leading open source standards for elastic cloud web server orchestration that compete with AWS EC2 functionality in the hosting marketplace. DevOps tools form a wide ecosystem with many independent third-party software development firms competing in the sector for market share in cloud hosting. This review presents the Top 12 & Top 100 DevOps Tools for 2018.

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Apache Mesos 1.5 Released: Container Orchestration with DC/OS & Marathon

Written by: , Mar. 9, 2018
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Resource Management, Programming Tools, Task Monitoring, Data Analytics, & Web Security

Apache Mesos is an open source project that abstracts the CPU, RAM, storage, and other computing resources available across multiple hardware instances in a data center in a unified manner so that systems administrators can operate the entire network as a single computer. Apache Mesos provides a set of unique APIs for resource management in cloud computing that can scale to over 10,000 nodes, integrating with other frameworks such as Hadoop, Chronos, Spark, Cassandra, & Kafka for complex web/mobile app deployments. Apache Mesos is used by Apple, Microsoft, PayPal, Twitter, Verizon, Samsung, Netflix, eBay, Bloomberg, AirBNB, Yelp, Uber, China Mobile, & many other companies for their data center management requirements. Benjamin Hindman, one of the principle founders of Mesos/Nexus at UC Berkeley, launched the start-up company Mesosphere in 2013 which produces DC/OS (Datacenter Operating System) as a production ready distribution of the code designed for enterprise use. Mesosphere DC/OS includes elastic cluster resource management tools that enable cloud orchestration at scale using Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, or Marathon. The most recent release of Apache Mesos (version 1.5) includes support for the Container Storage Interface (CSI) that allows the system to automatically create storage partitions based on preset application parameters with multi-cloud platform compatibility. The new release also includes better configuration support for Windows environments, a standalone container format, and improved container image garbage collection.

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Red Hat Acquires CoreOS to Expand New Kubernetes & Linux Container Solutions

Written by: , Feb. 17, 2018
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Container Linux, Tectonic, etcd, rkt, & Flannel to be integrated into OpenShift & Atomic Host

A seismic shift in the competitive Linux container and Kubernetes orchestration solutions landscape occurred on January 30th, 2018 with the announcement from Red Hat, Inc. that the company had finalized a deal to acquire CoreOS, along with their complete software portfolio & staff of 130 programming experts, for a price of $250 million USD. CoreOS has been a leading innovator in the open source community for data center management tools with the production of Container Linux, rkt, etcd, Flannel, & the Tectonic platform for Kubernetes cluster servers. Along with these resources, Red Hat also purchased the Quay.io private Docker registry service which CoreOS acquired in 2014 and used to start their NYC office. CoreOS was founded in 2013 in Palo Alto by Alex Polvi (CEO), Brandon Philips (CTO), and Michael Marineau. CoreOS had previously raised a total of $48 million USD from Google Ventures, Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and others to fund their start-up operations. Joe Fernandes, senior director of OpenShift Product Management at Red Hat summed up the rationale behind the acquisition by stating, "We see tremendous synergy both in our open source cultures and across our respective product portfolios." CoreOS's leading enterprise customers such as Verizon, eBay, Salesforce, Veritas, & Ticketmaster will also be migrated gradually to integrated Kubernetes and Linux container services managed by Red Hat.

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