Among the sites/services affected are Foursquare, Quora, Reddit, and Hootsuite (ht: The Next Web).

The issues appear to be coming out of Virginia. Amazon is providing updates on its Amazon Webservices Service Health Dashboard. All of the issues come from that location. One sequence of udpates attached to Amazon Cloudwatch reads:

2:26 AM PDT We are working on restoring connectivity to a small number of EC2, EBS, and RDS resources in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. While we restore connectivity, CloudWatch metrics for those resources will be delayed.

4:47 AM PDT CloudWatch metrics are delayed for some EBS and RDS resources in the US-EAST-1 region. The delays began at 12:55AM PDT. We have isolated the impact to a single availability zone, and are working towards a full resolution.

Another on Amazon Relational Database Service says:

1:48 AM PDT We are currently investigating connectivity and latency issues with RDS database instances in the US-EAST-1 region.

5:06 AM PDT IO latency issues have recovered in one of the two impacted Availability Zones in US-EAST-1. We continue to make progress on restoring access and resolving IO latency issues for remaining affected RDS database instances.

On AWS CloudFormation, it says:

3:29 AM PDT We are experiencing delays in creating and deleting stacks that include EBS, EC2 and RDS resources in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Existing stacks are not impacted.

5:10 AM PDT CloudFormation stack creation and deletion is delayed for stacks containing EC2, EBS and RDS resources in the US-EAST-1 region. The delays began at 12:55AM PDT. We have isolated the impact to a single availability zone, and are working towards a resolution.

Finally, on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, it says:

3:16 AM PDT We can confirm increased error rates impacting Elastic Beanstalk APIs and console, and we continue to work towards resolution.

4:18 AM PDT We continue to see increased error rates impacting Elastic Beanstalk APIs and console, and we are working towards resolution.

The rest of the list comes with the “service is operating normally” status.

Foursquare and Reddit seem to be back on track, but Quora and Hootsuite are still down at the time of this writing.

I wonder how much money is being lost based on Amazon’s server issues.

Rackspace considers the move a way to better position itself in Silicon Valley, as Cloudkick was originally funded by Y Combinator, and its headquarters is in San Francisco, "making Cloudkick’s headquarters the latest outpost for delivering Fanatical Support and innovation in cloud computing," a representative for Rackspace tells WebProNews.

"Cloudkick serves more than 1,500 businesses from Fortune 500 enterprises to nimble startups — and has seen more than 1 million servers pass through its tools," she says. "Through this acquisition, Rackspace will deliver even better support through superior management tools that will be available directly to customers and also to the Rackers who serve them."

"Until now, the cloud has been about automating hardware and making it more agile and efficient," explains Rackspace Chief Strategy Officer Lew Moorman. "But as cloud computing has made it easier to launch servers, companies launch a lot more of them, and use many of them inefficiently — and even lose track of some.  Cloudkick brings order to that chaos and sprawl. It takes cloud computing to a new level: into automation of the work of system administrators. In addition to providing robust cloud health information, Cloudkick enables automation around deployment and scaling.  It makes cloud computing more powerful, with less expense."

Cloudkick, which launched two years ago has been working with Mozilla, Vimeo, ProPublica and National Instruments, and is a member of the OpenStack community, the open source cloud project founded by Rackspace itself. 

Financial terms of the acquisition have not been revealed.

Original Article: Today Opera has released a product (as promised), which it claims reinvents the web. That may seem like an exaggerated statement, but it’s an interesting concept nonetheless.

The product is called Opera Unite, and it is available at labs.opera.com. What Opera Unite does, is basically turn your computer into both a client and a server. It eliminates the need for third-party servers.

"Today, we are opening the full potential of the Web for everyone," says Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner. "Technology moves in distinct cycles. PCs decentralized computing away from large mainframes. Opera Unite now decentralizes and democratizes the cloud. With server capability in the browser, Web developers can create Web applications with profound ease. Consumers have the flexibility to choose private and efficient ways of sharing information. We believe Opera Unite is one of our most significant innovations yet, because it changes forever the fundamental fabric of the Web."

Current Opera Unite services include file sharing, web server, media player, photo sharing, chat, and "the fridge," which allows users to post notes on their friends’ "virtual refrigerators." I’m thinking this is basically like Facebook’s "wall."

Here are some screenshots of what these services look like:

File Sharing

Web Server

Media Player

Photo Sharing

Chat

The Fridge

"What interests me about Opera Unite is how current technology and the social world are now interconnected," says Molly E. Holzschlag, Web evangelist for Opera. "Using open standards including HTML, CSS and JavaScript, developers and even enthusiasts with a little standards savvy can make their own Opera Unite service. Opera Unite allows people the ability to be imaginative with their skills and create a wide range of technical and social applications using the same open standards used today."

It seems that it is a little early for there to be any concrete opinions from users formed at this point. The Twitterverse appears to interested in the product, but a little unsure of what to expect (even those who have already downloaded it). Some have compared it to Google Wave, only with one being on the desktop, and the other on the web.

What are your initial thoughts on Opera Unite? Does this really "reinvent the web?" Tell us what you think.

Netcraft looks at the number of sites hosted on the different top servers. The following graph represents market share for top servers across all domains from August 1995 to October 2008:

Netcraft offers a more detailed look at the numbers of sites coming from different servers in this list. Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration compares NetCraft’s data to that of another Firm:

Now Domain Tools also tracks all the different web domain names registered on the Internet and their count puts the total number of active domains as 106 million.

This is different from the Netcraft survey as Domain Tools won’t count the sub-domains since they are all registered to the same owner (like Google’s blogspot) but may technically be a different website and hence adds to the Netcraft count.

I wonder how many of theses millions of sites are blogs. Of those, I wonder how many are still being updated. Those are some numbers that might fuel the debate about the life of blogs.

Following its April 2008 Web Server Survey, Netcraft revealed, "Largely due to the growth at Blogger, Google’s developer share increases by 0.54% to 6.08% this month, while Apache falls by 0.27% and Microsoft by 0.14%."  lighttpd and Sun are due to lose share, too, making Google the only developer to move ahead.

 Market Share for Top Servers

However, both Apache and Microsoft are still running far more sites, so, "[i]n absolute terms, this still means that Apache has gained slightly more sites than Google’s 1.07 million, while Microsoft gains 847 thousand sites."

What will happen next month is anybody’s guess; Netcraft goes out of its way to state that Google is not guaranteed to repeat this performance.  The data pool should grow larger, at least, as Netcraft recorded a growth of 3.1 million sites for this month alone.

Netcraft’s survey involved almost 168 million sites, by the way, and a hat tip goes to Alistair Croll for being the first to cover it.

YouTube is rolling out some of the benefits of that arrangement: it just announced that uploaders can now use a multi-file upload tool, and the maximum file size has been boosted by a factor of ten to 1 gigabyte from 100 megabytes (although they still can’t be any longer than 10 minutes). Just think — that means high-definition versions of Soulja Boy’s new dance and the latest LOLcatz video are coming your way.

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Ask, Dell Continue Energy-Saving Efforts

Granted, there’s no reason to have thought that Dell and Ask wouldn’t deliver, but environmental interests could easily have been set aside in pursuit of more acquisitions or a bigger share of the search market.  Look at the $100 laptop if you need an example of good intentions going awry.

So when Patrick Thibodeau reports that the new servers, made by Dell for Ask, use 30 percent less power than the old ones, it’s nice to see things tally with what our own David Utter reported as an initial estimate.

According to Thibodeau, Ask’s Mark Stockford, the senior vice president of operations, has seen some savings in other ways, as well.  “The box comes in at a much lower price because it only has the components that are required to support each application,” Stockford said.

On the whole, this development appears to continue a recent uptick in news relating to search and the environment – earlier this week, Microsoft launched a new site called MSN Green, and before that, Yahoo announced its involvement with wind and hydro projects in India and Brazil.

All right, so it sounds a little hokey, but the effort has some admirable goals.  Google.org has partnered with TechnoServe, and “[t]he program is designed to help Tanzanian entrepreneurs develop skills, obtain seed or expansion capital and establish the networks that help transform their business ideas into successful enterprises that create jobs and other income sources that transform the lives of all Tanzanians,” reports Alex Mkindi, TechnoServe’s Deputy Country Director in Tanzania, on the Official Google Blog.

Aside from the human-interest aspect, it’s also a pretty good PR move – thanks to Street View, and to some less-than-complimentary findings from Privacy International, Google’s not being looked at in quite the same “fun and quirky” way.  Believe Begin Become should at least reinforce the image of “goodness” that Google prefers.

It should act to elevate Google’s position within Tanzania, as well.  The search engine company has previously arranged to bring servers into the region, but with a new base of operations just a bit to the north, training 250 people in business management could lead to some very positive outcomes.

Indeed, David Bulengo, who works on the Believe Begin Become Organizing Committee, states, “The network of professionals and business leaders involved with Believe Begin Become will allow a new generation of young entrepreneurs the chance to learn from their experience and to create wonderful business opportunities.”

Whatever Google’s reasons for participating in this endeavor, it seems that Believe Begin Become’s outcome will be undeniably positive.

Odd Privacy Comments From Google’s Fleischer

Peter Fleischer became the latest to speak out about Sweden’s proposed law. If it takes effect, the government will be able legally to monitor email and telephone traffic going in and out of Sweden.

A Swedish English-language publication, The Local, cited Fleischer’s remarks from a Tuesday visit to the country:

"We have contacted Swedish authorities to give our view of the proposal and we have made it clear that we will never place any servers inside Sweden’s borders if the proposal goes through," Fleischer told Internet World. "We simply cannot compromise our users’ integrity by allowing Swedish authorities access to data that may not even concern Swedish activity," said Fleischer. "The proposal stems from a tradition begun by Saudi Arabia and China and simply has no place in a western democracy," he said.

That last comment caught our attention. We’re sure Fleischer is a busy guy, but he had to see the memo about Google willingly entering China and acceding to government censorship.

Then there is the matter of similar spying taking place much closer to Google’s Mountain View home. As many in the tech industry and elsewhere have noted, AT&T has been accused by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a former AT&T employee of doing what Sweden proposes.

Maybe we just missed the news that Fleischer or someone at Google has filed an amicus brief in the EFF case. If they haven’t, Fleischer might want to look into what this western democracy in America has been accused of doing to US citizens on a massive scale.

Conducted by Gelb Consulting Group in February of this year, The Microsoft High-Performance Computing Oil and Gas Industry Survey indicates that providing geoscientists with the latest and greatest in computing technology could increase overall oil and gas production.

Gelb tallied results from over 100 oil and gas industry experts from around the world. Findings of significant mention from the study include:

·    Eighty-one percent report that more ready access to high-performance computing capability could increase oil and gas production.

·    Eighty-six percent have computing power at their deskside, and 69 percent prefer computing power at their desktops.

·    Sixty-one percent believe that having the capability to run additional tasks and iterations will reduce project risk.

·    Fifty-six percent prefer to schedule their own jobs to a technical computing or HPC cluster rather than refer to a cluster administrator to manage the job queue.

·    Forty-seven percent say their computing-intensive scientific applications require multiple iterations.

·    Twenty-five percent of computing-intensive scientific applications still take from overnight to more than a week to run.

“Since the mid-1990s, the upstream oil and gas industry has had the goal of achieving dramatic cost savings in the area of technical computing,” said John Elmer, president of Gelb Consulting Group.

“This goal is being achieved today. For example, it used to be the case that geosciences applications managers would not let go of their UNIX machines for mission-critical applications. The tide has now turned with smart-client PCs and applications reaching a level of maturity, reliability and stability that has caused even the skeptics to trust a move to Microsoft Windows.”

“This new approach to high-performance computing doesn’t replace supercomputers in oil and gas. Instead, it makes technical computing more available to more people at a lower cost,” said John Fikany, vice president of the U.S. Manufacturing Group at Microsoft.

“By using Windows Compute Cluster Server, geoscientists are empowered to more easily access, analyze and garner deeper insights from complex data and information — ultimately getting oil and gas from the subsurface to the pump faster, more efficiently.”