The content below is taken from the original (IoT devices or humans?), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

A Swedish rail line can now collect fares by scanning its customers for embedded biometric chips. The primary benefit is the elimination of a physical ticket — plus it’s harder to lose. It sounds futuristic, but my dogs have been sporting embedded chips for over a decade.

If you think about it, physical tickets are kind of a silly. They are a surrogate for the person. The practice of scanning a ticket, instead of a person, was likely established when there just weren’t many viable alternatives. Technology now offers a more direct approach.

There are lots of examples in which companies attempt to track their customers be it frequent customer cards, credit card numbers, tickets, or other surrogates. But ultimately, wouldn’t it be better to just track the actual human customer? Not everyone is willing to embed chips in their skin, but there’s other options.

One of the better examples of equipping customers with trackable technology comes from the Disney theme parks. Disney’s MagicBands, introduced in 2013, are RFID bracelets provided to park visitors. Customers wear them because the bands offer several benefits including shorter lines, documented park history, and can eliminate the need to carry park tickets, hotel room keys, and credit cards.

Because RFID can be used for location tracking, the bands contribute to magical experiences. For example, you can order food, and then like magic, it is delivered to wherever you chose to sit.

Disney likes the MagicBands because they generate data about customer visits – where they go, how much they spend, and how long they wait in lines. The bands also generate incremental revenue opportunities. For example, park photographers can use them to identify faces and sell more photos.

The customer-as-IoT journey is just beginning. Some of the designers behind Disney’s MagicBands are now leading the next big evolution at Carnival Cruise Lines. This November, the Carnival Regal Princess will be the first ship to offer “Ocean Medallion Class” that utilizes the Ocean Medallion wearable. It’s the first ship in an aggressive vision that could extend across the entire fleet.

Carnival holds more than 40% of global cruise market share. In addition to its own flagship brand, the company has nine other cruise lines including Princess and Holland America. The Ocean Medallion program will certainly change cruising and has the potential to cause waves across the entire hospitality industry.

The Ocean Medallion program has three major components: the Ocean Medallion, a ship outfitted with sensors and displays, and the OCEAN application. The medallion is a small waterproof wearable that passengers receive before their trip even begins. It can be worn as a pendant, a pin, or a bracelet. The medallion communicates with newly installed receivers throughout the ship. OCEAN, or One Cruise Experience Access Network, is the back-end application that powers the Ocean Medallion experience.

Each medallion is outfitted with Bluetooth and NFC radios. Carnival is installing about 16 sensors for every passenger to ensure complete coverage throughout its ships. On the Carnival Regal Princess that meant about 7000 sensors and 75 miles of new cable. The entire retrofit includes new access points, hundreds of public wall-mounted touchscreens, and new Bluetooth enabled door-locks.  

RELATED: IoT catches on in New England fishing town

The Ocean Medallion program has objectives to increase revenue and decrease costs. On the revenue side, it creates additional and frictionless revenue opportunities. On the costs side, it allows staff to work more efficiently. Most significantly though, the program is designed to create personalized experiences intended to increase satisfaction and drive recurring business.

Cruise ships are sometimes described as giant floating hotels, but that’s a dramatic oversimplification. In addition to the fact they move, there’s some major operational differences. For example, the check-in process is much more intense on ships since thousands of guests check in within just a few hours. The medallion simplifies this immensely. Since guests receive their medallion before their cruise, check-in is just a matter of boarding the ship and unlocking a stateroom.

Cruise ships have been steadily growing in size which means more and more diverse programs and activities. The menu of choices is becoming overwhelming. Carnival intends to use OCEAN to match its customers to the right activities. OCEAN notes what you do, where you eat, what you buy, and what activities are of interest. It’s continuously updating its understanding of each passenger to improve its recommendations. It is conceptually similar to the recommendation engines implemented by Netflix and Amazon.

Passengers interact with OCEAN via touchscreens throughout the ship. No need to login as it knows when you are in front of it. These screens provide access to all kinds of up-to-date, personalized information including reservations and the location of those traveling with you.

The Ocean Medallion program is the cutting edge of wearable technology. Carnival and its partners Nytec and Level 11 created new systems and hardware to make it all work.

In subsequent posts, I will profile some of these stories – such as why they went with Bluetooth and NFC in the wearable, how they turned Bluetooth upside down, and some of the new types of services that become possible when so much customer information is known.

Many of these concepts will eventually appear in traditional hotels. Today, most frequent guest programs offer general incentives, but do little to personalize the experience. For example, Marriott hotels allow me to enter my Netflix credentials for in-room entertainment. Their systems erase it upon check-out, but why not automatically load it on check-in. 

Tracking customers will change many industries, and it won’t all happen through wearables. Video recognition and analytics use cases are also emerging. Jet Blue has begun using facial recognition in lieu of boarding passes.

What’s particularly noteworthy about the Ocean Medallion program is it is poised to revolutionize an old, disconnected industry. The IoT opportunity to transform industries knows few restrictions, and it will change products and services all around us.

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The content below is taken from the original (Google Glass is apparently still around — and just got its first update in nearly three years), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (Russian freight service Deliver closes seed round of $8M, with European plans), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Russia-based online freight service Deliver (formerly iCanDeliver) has closed a seed round of $8 million. The startup automates the process of ordering freight transport and makes things more efficient by finding the closest sender.

Inventure Partners (which has invested in Gett, Busfor, Amwell, Chronext and Netology) invested $3 million, joining A&NN Group and Singapore-based Amereus Group as backers.

Deliver’s competitors include Palletter (in Estonia) which matches shipments to nearby trucks in real-time and Convargo (in France) which has raised a $1.69M round and which also connects shippers with truckers.

Deliver is doubling down on its largest base in Russia where it has over 59,000 confirmed drivers registered, so far. Deliver now hopes to secure up to 15% of the Russian freight market, with plans to begin European expansion and promote more international transportation. European haulage networks were worth $96 billion in 2015.

Up to 23% of trucks have “empty kilometers” because of the ineffective transport planning involved which is why these startups have sprung up. Deliver can calculate shipping prices in seconds, handles several thousand orders a month and claims an average monthly growth of 30%. It finished beta testing in January of this year and entered into the active sales and regional development phase.

Founder Danil Rudakov says: “The efficiency of the logistics market today is extremely low in Russia and in Europe. Deliver guarantees shippers full safety of dispatch, transparent pricing, and high quality transportation.”

The content below is taken from the original (Azure Marketplace Test Drive), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (Girl Scouts can start earning cybersecurity badges in fall 2018), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

If your office in the future dodges a spearphishing attempt in the future, you might be thanking a Girl Scout. The organization partnered with Palo Alto Networks to release 18 new cybersecurity badges for members to earn over the next two years, with the first slated to come out in September 2018.

They won’t just be about minimizing hacking vectors: Younger Scouts will also learn about data privacy, cyberbullying and how to protect themselves online. Badges for older ones will focus on developing coding skills, learning about white hat hacking and creating firewalls. While preventative training has been erratically present in Scouting for some time — the Boy Scouts, for example, have had the Cyber Chip youth internet safety certification since 2012 — the Girl Scouts’ new set of badges looks to span a respectable breadth of online issues and opportunities.

If you’re surprised the Girl Scouts have a new badge teaching important tech literacy, you haven’t been paying attention. Back in 2011, the organization added ones for Computer Expert and Digital Movie Maker followed by an attempt in 2013 to introduce one for video games. Following the release of a badge dedicated to nurturing science, technology, engineering and math interests in 2015, the Girl Scouts partnered with Netflix last October to encourage young members to pursue STEM careers.

Via: CNN

Source: Palo Alto Networks, Girl Scouts of the United States of America

The content below is taken from the original (etcher (1.0.0)), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Flash OS images to SD cards and USB drives, safely and easily

The content below is taken from the original (What Is Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V Compute Resiliency?), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

In this post, I will explain Compute Resiliency. This feature of Windows Server 2016, where Failover Clustering is more tolerant of transient failures, can cause downtime to Hyper-V virtual machines.

Unnecessary Failovers

Many people, especially those new to high availability or building complex environments, find that Failover Clustering can be difficult. If you stick to the well-walked path, the designs are not that hard. The things that cause the most trouble are the things that should be dependable, such as drivers and firmware in network cards. Unfortunately, these unpredictable hardware faults and external issues, such as switch reboots or operators pulling the wrong cables, can cause transient issues. Keep in mind, these can also be predictable hardware faults and external issues depending on the brand of the network interface. Regardless, this can be very difficult to troubleshoot and can lead to downtime.

Every node or host in a Hyper-V cluster sends a heartbeat to the cluster. This heartbeat lets the other nodes know that the sending host is still alive. If a host fails to send a heartbeat for a long enough period, then that host is assumed to be offline. The remaining nodes in the cluster seize the clustered roles, or virtual machines in the case of Hyper-V, from the assumed-dead node.

If a transient networking issue interferes with the heartbeat of a host, then the cluster assumes that there is a problem. It seizes the virtual machines from that host. The virtual machines are booted up on other nodes in the cluster. If there are complex dependencies, then booting up a large number of virtual machines might take a long time. In the meantime, the transient issue has gone away and the original host is back online. The problem with transient issues is that they repeat and they are extremely difficult to identify. If they happen enough, people can lose confidence in the cluster. The cluster is reacting correctly to an external fault but it still creates confidence issues

Tolerance of Transient Issues

Microsoft studied its support calls and received tons of feedback from customers regarding issues with Hyper-V clusters. It was clear that issues outside of clustering was causing many problems. Software has the flexibility to overcome hard issues. Therefore, Microsoft decided to build extra tolerance for transient external issues into Hyper-V failover clusters in the form of Compute Resiliency.

In short, Compute Resiliency slows down the aggressive failover actions of a Hyper-V cluster. Most actual host outages are caused by external problems. Microsoft did the math and decided that by default, a cluster will wait 4 minutes before responding to a host failing to heartbeat. The 4 minutes is enough time for an operator to realize that they have pulled the wrong cable or for a top-of-rack switch to restart after a crash. During this time, a non-responding host has a status of Isolated in the cluster and failovers will not occur.

If a host fails to return online after 4 minutes have passed, then the cluster will initiate a failover of every virtual machine. The virtual machines will behave differently depending on your storage system:

• SMB 3.0: If the host is online and able to communicate with the storage, the virtual machines remain online.
• CSV on Block Storage: The virtual machine is placed into a Paused-Critical state.

If a host returns online before 4 minutes have expired, then it rejoins the cluster. What if the host goes offline again? Once again, the host has a status of Isolated and failovers will not take place. The default time is 2 hours. If the host becomes isolated for a third time in a 2 hour period, then the cluster will place that host into a Quarantined state. It will live migrate the virtual machines to more suitable hosts in the cluster.

Note that the times mentioned in this post, 4 minutes and 2 hours, are defaults and can be overridden. The 4-minute wait can be modified on a per-virtual machine basis. Compute Resiliency can be disabled on the cluster. This might make sense for clusters where transient issues are unlikely to isolate hosts or a completely self-contained cluster, such as a cluster-in-a-box.

The post What Is Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V Compute Resiliency? appeared first on Petri.

The content below is taken from the original (AWS Named as a Leader in Gartner’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant for 7th Consecutive Year), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Every product planning session at AWS revolves around customers. We do our best to listen and to learn, and to use what we hear to build the roadmaps for future development. Approximately 90% of the items on the roadmap originate with customer requests and are designed to meet specific needs and requirements that they share with us.

I strongly believe that this customer-driven innovation has helped us to secure the top-right corner of the Leaders quadrant in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for the 7th consecutive year, earning highest placement for ability to execute and furthest for completeness of vision:

To learn more, read the full report. It contains a lot of detail and is a great summary of the features and factors that our customers examine when choosing a cloud provider.

— Jeff;

The content below is taken from the original (Gartner names Microsoft Azure as a leader in the Cloud IaaS MQ), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (Bottlenecks of Modern Data Storage Technologies), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

We all know that the amount of data both globally in the world and on our personal computers, in particular, is growing constantly – day by day. The need for new data storage technologies exists and they appear with reasonable regularity.

Let’s consider storage technologies focusing on the internal organization of data storage – going from the hardware level of a physical hard drive to the logical level of a file system layout.

Basic Concepts

The problem, which users encountered almost from the moment the personal computers were designed, was that the capacity of a single disk, to put it mildly, was not very large – just imagine that in 1991 IBM introduced a disk with the “unimaginable” size… 1004 MB! The disk was composed of eight 3.5-inch platters.

This situation with disk capacities will always remain the same — hard disk vendors are constantly trying to design larger capacity disks, but the sizes (as well as prices) do not satisfy the user needs.

Back in those days, it became clear that a technology that allows you to combine several disks into a single storage space was needed. That’s how the RAID (Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks) technology was invented. The technology is based on combining different disks — from different vendors, with different characteristics — into a single storage option using the mirror, stripe, and parity techniques.

• Mirror (RAID1) – array member disks store the identical copies of data. To be honest, a mirror does not provide a large volume of storage, but the technology provides fault tolerance and is widely used in the nested array levels like RAID10.
• Stripe (RAID0) – disk space on the array member disks is cut into the blocks of the same size and then data is written to the blocks according to a specific pattern.
• Parity (RAID5) – disk space is also cut into the blocks but one block in each row is used for storing parity data – a derivative, usually XOR function, calculated over data blocks. This approach ensures redundancy, allowing a storage system to survive a disk failure without data loss.

All other storage technologies are, by and large, variations of the RAID technology. Let’s look more closely at some of the most popular ones.

Drobo BeyondRAID

The Drobo developers designed their own technology to be used in the Drobo devices – Drobo BeyondRAID. The technology was released a long time ago, in 2007, and uses the same RAID technique. However, this is not a “pure” RAID – RAID arrays in Drobo are created over the regions, which are several tens of megabytes in size, rather than over the whole hard drive, as is done in a traditional RAID. Next, the regions are combined into larger structures, called zones, from which file system clusters are then allocated.

Sounds difficult but still not bad…but there’s one more thing – a cluster map storing information on which cluster is located in which zone. The very cluster map is stored in a special zone as well — the map is fully integrated into the Drobo layout.

If the cluster map is lost or overwritten, data recovery doesn’t make sense because the cluster size is too small – all you get by analyzing data on a Drobo disk pack are a lot of meaningless data fragments.

Storage Spaces

In 2012, Microsoft released the Storage Spaces technology, allowing you to combine disks of different sizes into the pools, on which then it is possible to create spaces of five types — simple, mirror, 3-way mirror, parity, and double parity.

In Storage Spaces, disk space on the disks is cut into 256 MB slabs, which are then combined into spaces of a given type using the appropriate RAID technique. Similar to the Drobo BeyondRAID having a cluster map as a bottleneck, there is a table storing information on which slabs are combined into which RAIDs. If the table is lost, it is very difficult to restore a Storage Spaces layout. In the case of a mirror or parity space, there is at least theoretical background to recover a lost RAID configuration; for a simple layout, the configuration is lost irreversibly.

Another more interesting observation is that the modern trend is pools and spaces of 30-50 TB in size. Taking into account the slab size of 256 MB and 8-column layout, we have a maximum of 256 * 7 = 1.8 GB (for a parity space) per RAID. It is not difficult to imagine that the number of such micro-RAIDs in a Storage Spaces pool can easily reach tens of thousands!

NAS Devices

Network Attached Storage is a storage device that allows you to combine several hard disks into one large storage space, which is then connected to a computer network. The simplest NAS layout uses the following scheme – physical disks are combined into two RAIDs – one RAID is a small RAID1 for storing NAS firmware and another large RAID (usually RAID5) is for user data. These RAIDs are created by the Linux md-RAID driver and typically one of the Linux file systems is used, usually ext or XFS. The scheme implies using disks of the same size – you can still use disks of different sizes but the overall capacity will be tightly tied to the size of the smallest disk.

Nowadays, schemes of combining disks are more complicated. They allow using disks of different sizes without disk space loss and, more than that, it is possible to replace disks with the larger ones without full-scale rebuilding. One example is Synology NASes, where you can use completely different disks thanks to the Synology Hybrid RAID technology.

At this, NAS vendors did not stop and first NETGEAR and then Synology started using a new file system – BTRFS. The file system differs from a “pure” file system, which knows nothing about the underlying physical layout, in that it combines both the functions of the disk space allocator and the file system driver.

Inside, BTRFS operates with not very large of blocks (1GB for user data and minimum 4 MB for metadata), which are called chunks. Chunks are made from the blocks allocated on the physical disks and combined into larger continuous blocks using the RAID technology.

Until recently, chunks were combined into the blocks using the JBOD technique, but now BTRFS supports RAID5 and RAID6 with the 64 KB stripe size. With BTRFS, it is possible to have multi-layer RAID configurations like those where there is a main RAID5 created over the physical disks and multiple sub-RAIDs created over chunks allocated from the main RAID.

The information on how chunks are composed is stored in the file system metadata. Should the metadata be lost, nothing can be recovered.

ReFS

ReFS filesystem was released simultaneously with the Microsoft Storage Spaces technology. The first ReFS version was quite simple – a file record stored the file attribute data such as file size, creation/modification times, and the information about the file content location. A directory record contained information about files and folders belonging to the directory.

In 2016, Microsoft released ReFS of the next generation. Surprisingly, the modern ReFS now has an analogous of a cluster map. On the one hand, there are several copies of the map stored on a volume; on the other hand, file deletion results in discarding the corresponding records in the cluster map. Deleted file data can still be on the disks but you cannot get it extracted because cluster location is not available any longer.

Conclusion

Obviously, with increasing disk capacity, new schemes of storing data are needed. The modern technologies still use the old good RAID, but there is a tendency to have many small RAIDs along with the cluster maps. RAID configuration metadata and cluster maps are the main bottlenecks of the modern storage technologies.

Written by Elena Pakhomova of www.ReclaiMe.com, offering data recovery solutions for a wide variety of data storage technologies.

The post Bottlenecks of Modern Data Storage Technologies appeared first on Petri.

The content below is taken from the original (Microsoft Pix can now turn your iPhone photos into art, thanks to A.I.), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (HP is turning trash into printer cartridges), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

All those printer cartridges from HP that usually cost an arm and leg will start helping to do some good in the world beyond your prints of kitten photos. During an event at its headquarters, HP announced that it is using recycled plastic from Haiti to manufacture select cartridges.

The initiative will help create jobs in Haiti and provide educational opportunities and scholarships for children. More importantly, its goal is to get the kids who are collecting recycled bottles out of landfills and into schools. Plus, it helps support their parents and other adults with safety and job training. The partnership will also help provide medical care.

HP is teaming up with Thread, a company that already uses recycled bottles from Haiti and Honduras to create clothes. The fabric it produces is used by Timberland and Kenneth Cole. In addition to cleaning up the world and helping create a job market, Thread is trying to reduce child labor by creating an environment that employs older family members. Part of that includes starting a coalition that HP is part of.

The First Mile coalition which includes HP, Thread, Timberland, Team Tassy and ACOP helps get kids in school in addition to offering employment opportunities for adults and medical care. Of course, it also reduces the amount of plastic bottles that end up in landfills and in our oceans. So maybe paying those high ink prices is worth it.

Source: HP

The content below is taken from the original (Google Drive will soon back up any file or folder on your computer), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

If you use a cloud storage app on your PC, there’s a good chance you use it as much for backing up your system as you do for accessing files on different devices. And Google knows it. The internet giant is reinventing its Drive desktop app as Backup and Sync, a tool that… well, just look at the name. While it largely accomplishes the same tasks, it’s now focused more on safeguarding your data, regardless of where it’s stored on your computer. That includes pictures, too — the updated software integrates the Google Photos desktop app, so you only need one app to sync it all. The only real limitation is the amount of Drive space you have… that 15GB free tier might not cut it.

Backup and Sync will launch June 28th for Mac and Windows users. At the moment, though, it’s not meant for business — Google would rather point you to its upcoming Drive File Stream if you rely on its cloud services for work. If all you need is a safety net for your personal documents, though, you won’t have too much longer to wait.

Source: G Suite Updates

The content below is taken from the original (Manage Instances at Scale without SSH Access Using EC2 Run Command), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The guest post below, written by Ananth Vaidyanathan (Senior Product Manager for EC2 Systems Manager) and Rich Urmston (Senior Director of Cloud Architecture at Pegasystems) shows you how to use EC2 Run Command to manage a large collection of EC2 instances without having to resort to SSH.

— Jeff;

Enterprises often have several managed environments and thousands of Amazon EC2 instances. It’s important to manage systems securely, without the headaches of Secure Shell (SSH). Run Command, part of Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, allows you to run remote commands on instances (or groups of instances using tags) in a controlled and auditable manner. It’s been a nice added productivity boost for Pega Cloud operations, which rely daily on Run Command services.

You can control Run Command access through standard IAM roles and policies, define documents to take input parameters, control the S3 bucket used to return command output. You can also share your documents with other AWS accounts, or with the public. All in all, Run Command provides a nice set of remote management features.

Better than SSH
Here’s why Run Command is a better option than SSH and why Pegasystems has adopted it as their primary remote management tool:

Run Command Takes Less Time –  Securely connecting to an instance requires a few steps e.g. jumpboxes to connect to or IP addresses to whitelist etc. With Run Command, cloud ops engineers can invoke commands directly from their laptop, and never have to find keys or even instance IDs. Instead, system security relies on AWS auth, IAM roles and policies.

Run Command Operations are Fully Audited – With SSH, there is no real control over what they can do, nor is there an audit trail. With Run Command, every invoked operation is audited in CloudTrail, including information on the invoking user, instances on which command was run, parameters, and operation status. You have full control and ability to restrict what functions engineers can perform on a system.

Run Command has no SSH keys to Manage – Run Command leverages standard AWS credentials, API keys, and IAM policies. Through integration with a corporate auth system, engineers can interact with systems based on their corporate credentials and identity.

Run Command can Manage Multiple Systems at the Same Time – Simple tasks such as looking at the status of a Linux service or retrieving a log file across a fleet of managed instances is cumbersome using SSH. Run Command allows you to specify a list of instances by IDs or tags, and invokes your command, in parallel, across the specified fleet. This provides great leverage when troubleshooting or managing more than the smallest Pega clusters.

Run Command Makes Automating Complex Tasks Easier – Standardizing operational tasks requires detailed procedure documents or scripts describing the exact commands. Managing or deploying these scripts across the fleet is cumbersome. Run Command documents provide an easy way to encapsulate complex functions, and handle document management and access controls. When combined with AWS Lambda, documents provide a powerful automation platform to handle any complex task.

Example – Restarting a Docker Container
Here is an example of a simple document used to restart a Docker container. It takes one parameter; the name of the Docker container to restart. It uses the AWS-RunShellScript method to invoke the command. The output is collected automatically by the service and returned to the caller. For an example of the latest document schema, see Creating Systems Manager Documents.

{
  "schemaVersion":"1.2",
  "description":"Restart the specified docker container.",
  "parameters":{
    "param":{
      "type":"String",
      "description":"(Required) name of the container to restart.",
      "maxChars":1024
    }
  },
  "runtimeConfig":{
    "aws:runShellScript":{
      "properties":[
        {
          "id":"0.aws:runShellScript",
          "runCommand":[
            "docker restart "
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Putting Run Command into practice at Pegasystems
The Pegasystems provisioning system sits on AWS CloudFormation, which is used to deploy and update Pega Cloud resources. Layered on top of it is the Pega Provisioning Engine, a serverless, Lambda-based service that manages a library of CloudFormation templates and Ansible playbooks.

A Configuration Management Database (CMDB) tracks all the configurations details and history of every deployment and update, and lays out its data using a hierarchical directory naming convention. The following diagram shows how the various systems are integrated:

For cloud system management, Pega operations uses a command line version called cuttysh and a graphical version based on the Pega 7 platform, called the Pega Operations Portal. Both tools allow you to browse the CMDB of deployed environments, view configuration settings, and interact with deployed EC2 instances through Run Command.

CLI Walkthrough
Here is a CLI walkthrough for looking into a customer deployment and interacting with instances using Run Command.

Launching the cuttysh tool brings you to the root of the CMDB and a list of the provisioned customers:

% cuttysh
d CUSTA
d CUSTB
d CUSTC
d CUSTD

You interact with the CMDB using standard Linux shell commands, such as cd, ls, cat, and grep. Items prefixed with s are services that have viewable properties. Items prefixed with d are navigable subdirectories in the CMDB hierarchy.

In this example, change directories into customer CUSTB’s portion of the CMDB hierarchy, and then further into a provisioned Pega environment called env1, under the Dev network. The tool displays the artifacts that are provisioned for that environment. These entries map to provisioned CloudFormation templates.

> cd CUSTB
/ROOT/CUSTB/us-east-1 > cd DEV/env1

The ls –l command shows the version of the provisioned resources. These version numbers map back to source control–managed artifacts for the CloudFormation, Ansible, and other components that compose a version of the Pega Cloud.

/ROOT/CUSTB/us-east-1/DEV/env1 > ls -l
s 1.2.5 RDSDatabase 
s 1.2.5 PegaAppTier 
s 7.2.1 Pega7 

Now, use Run Command to interact with the deployed environments. To do this, use the attach command and specify the service with which to interact. In the following example, you attach to the Pega Web Tier. Using the information in the CMDB and instance tags, the CLI finds the corresponding EC2 instances and displays some basic information about them. This deployment has three instances.

/ROOT/CUSTB/us-east-1/DEV/env1 > attach PegaWebTier
 # ID         State  Public Ip    Private Ip  Launch Time
 0 i-0cf0e84 running 52.63.216.42 10.96.15.70 2017-01-16 
 1 i-0043c1d running 53.47.191.22 10.96.15.43 2017-01-16 
 2 i-09b879e running 55.93.118.27 10.96.15.19 2017-01-16 

From here, you can use the run command to invoke Run Command documents. In the following example, you run the docker-ps document against instance 0 (the first one on the list). EC2 executes the command and returns the output to the CLI, which in turn shows it.

/ROOT/CUSTB/us-east-1/DEV/env1 > run 0 docker-ps
. . 
CONTAINER ID IMAGE             CREATED      STATUS        NAMES
2f187cc38c1  pega-7.2         10 weeks ago  Up 8 weeks    pega-web

Using the same command and some of the other documents that have been defined, you can restart a Docker container or even pull back the contents of a file to your local system. When you get a file, Run Command also leaves a copy in an S3 bucket in case you want to pass the link along to a colleague.

/ROOT/CUSTB/us-east-1/DEV/env1 > run 0 docker-restart pega-web
..
pega-web

/ROOT/CUSTB/us-east-1/DEV/env1 > run 0 get-file /var/log/cfn-init-cmd.log
. . . . . 
get-file

Data has been copied locally to: /tmp/get-file/i-0563c9e/data
Data is also available in S3 at: s3://my-bucket/CUSTB/cuttysh/get-file/data

Now, leverage the Run Command ability to do more than one thing at a time. In the following example, you attach to a deployment with three running instances and want to see the uptime for each instance. Using the par (parallel) option for run, the CLI tells Run Command to execute the uptime document on all instances in parallel.

/ROOT/CUSTB/us-east-1/DEV/env1 > run par uptime
 …
Output for: i-006bdc991385c33
 20:39:12 up 15 days, 3:54, 0 users, load average: 0.42, 0.32, 0.30

Output for: i-09390dbff062618
 20:39:12 up 15 days, 3:54, 0 users, load average: 0.08, 0.19, 0.22

Output for: i-08367d0114c94f1
 20:39:12 up 15 days, 3:54, 0 users, load average: 0.36, 0.40, 0.40

Commands are complete.
/ROOT/PEGACLOUD/CUSTB/us-east-1/PROD/prod1 > 

Summary
Run Command improves productivity by giving you faster access to systems and the ability to run operations across a group of instances. Pega Cloud operations has integrated Run Command with other operational tools to provide a clean and secure method for managing systems. This greatly improves operational efficiency, and gives greater control over who can do what in managed deployments. The Pega continual improvement process regularly assesses why operators need access, and turns those operations into new Run Command documents to be added to the library. In fact, their long-term goal is to stop deploying cloud systems with SSH enabled.

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— Ananth and Rich