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WorldDirector multicloud architecture

Blog, E-government, Globally distributed cloud hosting, Globally distributed DNS Network, Globally distributed mail services, Managed cloud services, Streaming

WorldDirector in a multicloud architecture

Multicloud architecture, in which different cloud providers host multiple services, is becoming increasingly popular among organisations.

According to Eurostat 41% of enterprises in the European Union have at least one application hosted in the cloud in 2021. Hosting in the cloud can save on initial infrastructure, planned and unexpected maintenance, and operational costs. However, there are challenges and complexities associated with adopting a multi-cloud architecture that organisations should consider.

Challenges in multi-cloud migration

One of the organisations’ most significant challenges when migrating to the cloud is choosing the right platform. Sometimes, the choice is made for them, for example, when certain outsourced services work only with certain cloud providers. In other cases, organisations had become locked into using a specific cloud vendor when applications were first moved to the cloud. Another challenge associated with running a multi-cloud architecture centres on security. Organisations need to apply a consistent security policy across all cloud platforms that are consistent with the security policy of internal systems. This can be challenging because different cloud providers have different security protocols.

Milano Ventures’  WorldDirector technology as a fully-managed multi-cloud enabler

Milano Ventures Ltd help managers and leaders understand the challenges of migrating to and securing a multi-cloud infrastructure. Our technology called WorldDirector is offered as fully-managed service across distributed private and public clouds and operates natively on multi-cloud environments, including proprietary and secure “edge” technologies designed to secure and protect the client’s data and applications.

WorldDirector as globally distributed , self resilient multicloudOverall, a multi-cloud architecture can provide many benefits for an organisation but also comes with challenges. Choosing the right platform and ensuring a consistent security policy across all cloud platforms are two key considerations organisations must consider when migrating to a multi-cloud infrastructure.

Benefits of moving to a multi-cloud infrastructure

The future of IT projects is in the cloud, and the benefits of cost savings, resiliency, and new feature enhancements that organizations realize by moving to the cloud are too great to ignore. But there is a difference between moving to the cloud and moving to a multicloud or hybrid cloud environment. Milano Ventures Ltd helps small and large organisations to evaluate which strategy is right for their applications.

When deciding whether to move to a multicloud environment, it is important to weigh the pros and cons of the decision. The first step is to examine where the application currently sits. Is it hosted in a datacenter managed by your organization, colocated, or is it already hosted in a cloud provider’s datacenter? Many organizations start by moving their application to a single cloud provider first in order to understand the experience and the challenges associated with cloud migration.

Milano Ventures multi-cloud consulting services

Another important factor to consider is how much control your team is willing to surrender to the cloud providers. Cloud providers offer a range of services from the most basic, in which the cloud provider simply offers hardware and a range of IP addresses, all the way up to a fully managed service. The service you choose is also a budgetary matter. The more cloud provider services you take advantage of, the greater the costs.

It’s also important to determine how quickly your provider installs patches and to fully document code and dependencies prior to moving to a multicloud environment. You must also demand the same from your cloud providers. You need to fully understand the services the organization is using, what the cloud providers’ patching cycles are, and how to get support if something goes wrong.

Milano Ventures multicloud migration consultingDesigning for a multicloud infrastructure often means redesigning your application to accommodate a more complex networking and infrastructure environment. We, at Milano Ventures Ltd, we have designed our multi-cloud technology in a way that such modifications are often unnecessary as WorldDirector can be totally transparent to both users and application data.

We have have architects on staff who can help answer any questions from your team and offer tips to make the migration process smoother. Cloud architects are a valuable and expensive resource for many organizations, so often it pays to have these competences outsourced when evaluating migration to a multicloud platform.

Conclusion

Moving to a multicloud environment is a big decision that requires careful consideration of the pros and cons and a thorough evaluation of your organization’s readiness. The benefits of cost savings, resiliency, and new feature enhancements are undeniable, but it’s important to understand the challenges and limitations of a multicloud environment before making the move. With the right planning and assistance from cloud providers, organizations can successfully migrate to a multicloud environment.

What is WorldDirector?

Blog, E-government, Globally distributed cloud hosting, Globally distributed DNS Network, Globally distributed mail services, Managed cloud services, Streaming

What is WorldDirector?

WorldDirector is a fully managed Internet cloud technology used to create globally distributed, geographically load-balanced private and public clouds or Content Delivery Networks (CDN), designed to accelerate content from enterprise (private cloud) public cloud data centres to remote clients at the edge of the Internet. WorldDirector is the first-ever technology of this kind, developed in 1994 and deployed in 1995.

In 1994, the WorldDirector design’s original aim was to overcome the effects of a massive earthquake that would keep Silicon Valley servers out of reach for several weeks.

WorldDirector has evolved into a modular product and is offered as a service (PaaS, IaaS), optionally with open source or custom applications (SaaS). It also includes content acceleration by HTTP compression, anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-trojans, anti-worm, anti-cryptolockers filters and DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) protection local and global load balancing, intrinsic disaster recovery by active and passive data duplication across several data-centres. WorldDIrector may also be used to provide an effective and inexpensive solution to disaster recovery and can be bundled to provide cloud services, such as hosting, colocation, email services, DNS, data archives, backups, audio and video streaming.

WorldDirector was nominated for the IST Prize

IST Prize nomination

In 2003 the European IST prize selected WorldDirector as a “European IST Prize Nominee”. The European IST Prize was the most distinguished award for innovative European IT products. Selection criteria for the prize included: technical excellence, innovative content, potential market impact, capacity to generate employment, contribution to the acceptance and understanding of IST in society, and likely social impact.

From the product perspective, WorldDirector ensures that Internet connectivity is the most efficient and reliable on the market at the best cost of ownership. WorldDirector can enable any site or Internet application. All that is needed is that one of our Linux devices containing WorldDirector hardware and software is placed close to the customer’s server and/or at the ISP’s Web farm. WorldDirector does not require any ‘extra’ software installed on the Client software or at the client server side. There is no ‘Plug-in’ of any kind at either server or client end, nor any modification to the server application needed.

WorldDirector is currently available either under license or as a fully managed service, including hardware and software to install a complete WorldDirector CDN solution. It is available to host end-users applications, ISPs, and corporate accounts. WorldDirector is offered at Wornex data centres in Europe, the USA and Asia (including as an option: AWS, Google and Azure cloud locations) and provides service to 300+ websites, B2B & B2C applications, portals and streaming services on behalf of customers in Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the USA.

Which innovative features does WorldDirector provide?

In 2015, WorldDirector was re-developed into a modular product and included the following features:

  • Edge caching for Internet servers and applications, regardless of protocol (HTTP, FTP, TCP/IP, UDP, etc.);
  • Multimedia streaming (audio & video) enabler from multiple locations, to bring multimedia content close to the edge of the Internet, a
    WorldDirector architecture

    WorldDirector architecture

    nd to the end-user;

  • HTTP content acceleration via standard IETF Content-Encoding to any Web site, regardless of the server’s operating system, HTTP origin server or type of Internet application;
  • Static and dynamic web server accelerator: adds scalability at a very low cost to any web portal or application. Offers more than 40 times increase in performance for dynamic portals, with more than 200 concurrent accesses.
  • Global and local load balancing: this will automatically reduce response time under high load and significantly reduce the load on the origin website. Compared to other systems, an increased number of edge servers is not required. Each WorldDirector node’s cost is a fraction of the origin Web server in the case of large portals. For smaller sites, each WorldDirector node may be shared among different websites;
  • Protection against Internet Worms & DDOS by filtering undesired requests to the origin server, protecting cross–site scripting vulnerability, and uploading malware to origin servers. This may be especially useful to avoid situations of network congestion and breakdowns such as those created by the internet worms, most types of attacks and similar;
  • Automatic Disaster Recovery for any Web site, multimedia archive or FTP site: any content available via “GET” (including dynamic portals) may be made available from any WorldDirector node when the origin Web site is unavailable;
  • Automatic configuration and de-configuration of each WorldDirector node when servers are down and up again. Any server can be brought down for maintenance when needed, or any network segment can fail without disrupting service until at least one WorldDirector node is reachable. This mechanism is transparent to end-user, applications, and administrators. It does NOT depend on any master/slave and has NO central point of failure characteristics like similar cloud and CDN implementations. It also introduces no latency compared to other masters/slave or star centred solutions.
  • Distributed email service: WorldDirector is also very effectively used to provide a redundant, globally distributed corporate email service (based on multiple geographically distributed SMTP & MX servers), with DDOS, antivirus and spam protection that can sustain high traffic peaks and multiple server downtime with uninterrupted service.

WorldDirector compared to other cloud and CDN solutions

Although Web accelerators, content caching devices, and multimedia streaming/caching services have recently become available (or claim to be), no similar product or service is currently marketed, including all the features above.

Generally speaking, cloud solutions are delivered by a single data centre location, possibly using redundant hardware, but more often from a single site, from a single network or AS (Autonomous System), representing a single point of failure. However, WorldDirector provides all services from many different ASes, different networks, and several different geographical servers that operate as autonomous nodes in an all-master (not master-slave) configuration. It operates effectively and transparently even if some servers or parts of the Internet are down or unreachable.

Similar services offered by competitors may require modification of the Web site content to provide replication. Others sell devices that heavily depend on master/slave or redirection mechanisms, may add latency and may operate as a single point of failure, diminishing the whole system’s reliability in case of failures.

WorldDirector is conceived as a turn-key system with full service, and it is 100% transparent both to any application. WordlDirector does not require any modification to the origin web server, its pages or any of its applications) and clients (it does not require any additional software or plug-in). Additionally, the reliability of the WorldDirector system has allowed us to maintain a status of 100% always available since 1995 for many clients’ websites and applications, even when one or more servers have been unavailable for hours or days for maintenance or due to faults either in the network, hardware or software.

No backup is secure in the cloud, nobody is liable for your data losses

Blog, Managed cloud services

No backup is secure in the cloud, nobody is liable for your data losses

I often get asked about how secure is our clients’ data, and how can a customer backup their data safely. European privacy laws, for example, require that personal data are kept secure and can always be recovered, but there is huge ignorance or wrong assumptions on the part of many IT managers that once they backup data in the cloud, they can have peace of mind.

Among liars in our industry, some low cost, control panel hosting or cloud providers, for example, offer unlimited in/out data transfer, unlimited disk space and free backup services at a very low monthly cost. They are just not liars, but their marketing strategy works well in low advertising cost and free options, well, until you need your data back. If you look carefully between the lines of most fine printed SLAs and contracts, there is mostly no liability for service interruption or data losses. Likely you will also be discontinued if your disk space or monthly data transfer is above the average clients’ usage.

As a side note, Microsoft just discontinued its unlimited OneDrive storage because apparently someone was abusing it and they were surely losing money.

Let’s focus on cloud backups

Several low-cost web hosting companies offer free daily or even hourly backups of web data. What a temptation to upload all of your pictures, all music and videos to a web hosting space for a few dollars, and even get a free backup!

Akeeba backup plugin for WordPress and Akeeba extension for Joomla are some of the solutions that our clients use to save a backup copy of both their web data and databases automatically on the same web/FTP space as the website. Our clients apparently save money, instead of ordering an off-line backup service that is charged more but offers some (real) additional peace of mind.

In fact, for this or any similar backup solution, you should check whether backup files live on the same web or FTP space as the website, because (quite often) a backup remains indefinitely on the same disk or same physical storage device as the original data.

What does it mean? If there is a severe hardware failure, especially with cheap storage solutions, then there may be no data and no backup left, since both the original data and any backup copies were on the same broken storage device. There is usually no or little incentive on the cloud provider in recovering your data because in most cases you have no contractual guarantee on persistence or recovery of your data (check liability or service agreements of major cloud providers excerpted below).

Online services, backup and restore procedures may greatly differ from low cost, professional hosting services and cloud providers. On the low-cost control panel web services, risks can be much higher, also due to the fact that there may not be any off-line backup of clients’ data; control panel software can be more exposed to bugs and security issues that cannot be corrected immediately; and hundreds of clients are usually packed on high density, memory, disks and networks of low-cost service providers.

No liability for data losses in the cloud

In general there is no guarantee of service continuity or data loss when you look at contracts and SLAs or – if there is any – it’s not for standard services and not in standard SLAs. Amazon, Google and Microsoft mention very clearly that their liability is none (or almost none) in case of service interruption and loss of customers’ data (I lost an entire disk when running a test on Amazon AWS, it failed and was put out of service. However, since all data was replicated on WorldDirector’s servers outside AWS, I could easily rebuild it).

Amazon AWS data loss liability

Amazon’s AWS terms:

https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ – specifically, section 11:

WE AND OUR AFFILIATES OR LICENSORS WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES (INCLUDING DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, GOODWILL, USE, OR DATA), EVEN IF A PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. FURTHER, NEITHER WE NOR ANY OF OUR AFFILIATES OR LICENSORS WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY COMPENSATION, REIMBURSEMENT, OR DAMAGES ARISING IN CONNECTION WITH: (A) YOUR INABILITY TO USE THE SERVICES, …

Google data loss liability

Excerpt of Google’s liability: https://www.google.com/policies/terms/

WHEN PERMITTED BY LAW, GOOGLE, AND GOOGLE’S SUPPLIERS AND DISTRIBUTORS, WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR LOST PROFITS, REVENUES, OR DATA, FINANCIAL LOSSES OR INDIRECT, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES …

Microsoft’s data loss liability

Microsoft Policy:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/subscription-agreement-nov-2014/

7.2 : EXCLUSION. Neither party will be liable for indirect, special, incidental, consequential, punitive, or exemplary damages, or damages for lost profits, revenues, business interruption, or loss of business information, even if the party knew that such damages were possible.

What can you do to secure your data?

I started my career in the GTD5-EAX digital telephone exchange world in the 80 and 90s’. At that time, if you wanted to guarantee uninterrupted telephone service, exchanges had to be duplicated (as well as billing data), and spare copies of hardware were to be made active automatically whenever there was a fault. The only bottleneck was the digital subscriber’s line and its interface.

To avoid service disruption, if you work on critical applications, you should use a backup solution based on multiple, redundant, off-line storage that is not using the same hardware devices as your live data. The higher the number of redundant copies made off-line and at different geographical locations, the higher the likelihood that you can recover your data in full as soon as it is needed.

Also: never trust your only cloud provider 100%, use more than one provider, and more than one data-centre to store your data, and also keep additional copies off-the cloud if you can.

Conclusions

If you want to have a close to 100% service guarantee and a real ability to recover data, what you can do is minimize the risks by paying more and make use of fully redundant services, i.e. redundant connectivity offered by many different AS (Autonomous Systems), full hardware and software redundancy (multiple cold or hot copies), maintain redundant off-line backups, and store data and offer access from servers located at different geographical locations in a global load balancing configuration that has no single point of failure.

5 secrets to fast and reliable cloud services

Blog, Case Histories, Globally distributed cloud hosting, Managed cloud services, Streaming

5 secrets to fast and reliable cloud services

I often come across low cost, low-grade competitors who offer cloud and free-bundled DNS services out of a single server farm or, even worse, providing DNS services hosted on the same server or the same network, sometimes even at the end of a very remote xDSL line. Under these conditions, using a single location for a DNS system, long latency and any temporary network failure cause disruption of all services for a domain, including the potential loss of email.

The importance of a good Domain Name System (DNS) and a network consisting of globally distributed application servers help to build fast and reliable cloud services.

  1. When looking for always-on internet solutions, to protect against network failures and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks the ideal situation is to use redundancy. This usually means using both redundant DNS and redundant servers hosted at different locations, possibly routed by different AS (Autonomous Systems). Down-times with major cloud and CDN providers often occur because their systems are not designed to survive a single point of failure that is inherent in their architecture.
  2. Any cloud service provider should offer their clients multiple (more than two), redundant DNS servers on different network segments and at various physical locations, with inherent redundancy in all potential single point of failures. Anycast DNS services can also be a more expensive solution (sometimes less effective) to this problem.
  3. Do you remember the notorious technological problems of HealthCare.gov (the US president Obama Health Insurance Marketplace)? When too many users access an application at the same time (i.e. any line application or a web server) either the server itself or the network may become overloaded. The result is increased latency (slow or no response) and potential loss of data. By carefully engineering on-line applications so that the number of servers can be dynamically increased, the application load and the number of users may be distributed among different servers, at different geographical locations, and more transactions can be managed at the same time. On the other hand, when a single data centre or a single server fails, or if a router or the network is overloaded, all online services will become slow or unreachable.
  4. By increasing the number of geographical locations where multiple origin servers are hosted, it is also possible to “load balance” and improve reliability of the whole system. If one or more servers or one or more network segments fail, a globally distributed load balancing system will continue to provide service, until there is at least one server online. To this extent, the most common load-balancing or passive CDN solutions that rely on a single origin server are not valid solutions.
  5. Configuration and de-configuration of servers in case of network or server problems should be fully automatic and should require little or no human intervention after initial set-up. A global load balancing mechanism like WorldDirector provides a fully redundant and distributed DNS system including content acceleration.

Check for example applications like Italyguides by Compart Multimedia that use a distributed cloud system. Italyguides appears “faster” anywhere in the world, and responds quickly to end users despite a large amount of data involved.