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Tag Archives: creative

Hiring a Director of Sales

Post Syndicated from Yev original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hiring-a-director-of-sales/

Backblaze is hiring a Director of Sales. This is a critical role for Backblaze as we continue to grow the team. We need a strong leader who has experience in scaling a sales team and who has an excellent track record for exceeding goals by selling Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. In addition, this leader will need to be highly motivated, as well as able to create and develop a highly-motivated, success oriented sales team that has fun and enjoys what they do.

The History of Backblaze from our CEO
In 2007, after a friend’s computer crash caused her some suffering, we realized that with every photo, video, song, and document going digital, everyone would eventually lose all of their information. Five of us quit our jobs to start a company with the goal of making it easy for people to back up their data.

Like many startups, for a while we worked out of a co-founder’s one-bedroom apartment. Unlike most startups, we made an explicit agreement not to raise funding during the first year. We would then touch base every six months and decide whether to raise or not. We wanted to focus on building the company and the product, not on pitching and slide decks. And critically, we wanted to build a culture that understood money comes from customers, not the magical VC giving tree. Over the course of 5 years we built a profitable, multi-million dollar revenue business — and only then did we raise a VC round.

Fast forward 10 years later and our world looks quite different. You’ll have some fantastic assets to work with:

  • A brand millions recognize for openness, ease-of-use, and affordability.
  • A computer backup service that stores over 500 petabytes of data, has recovered over 30 billion files for hundreds of thousands of paying customers — most of whom self-identify as being the people that find and recommend technology products to their friends.
  • Our B2 service that provides the lowest cost cloud storage on the planet at 1/4th the price Amazon, Google or Microsoft charges. While being a newer product on the market, it already has over 100,000 IT and developers signed up as well as an ecosystem building up around it.
  • A growing, profitable and cash-flow positive company.
  • And last, but most definitely not least: a great sales team.

You might be saying, “sounds like you’ve got this under control — why do you need me?” Don’t be misled. We need you. Here’s why:

  • We have a great team, but we are in the process of expanding and we need to develop a structure that will easily scale and provide the most success to drive revenue.
  • We just launched our outbound sales efforts and we need someone to help develop that into a fully successful program that’s building a strong pipeline and closing business.
  • We need someone to work with the marketing department and figure out how to generate more inbound opportunities that the sales team can follow up on and close.
  • We need someone who will work closely in developing the skills of our current sales team and build a path for career growth and advancement.
  • We want someone to manage our Customer Success program.

So that’s a bit about us. What are we looking for in you?

Experience: As a sales leader, you will strategically build and drive the territory’s sales pipeline by assembling and leading a skilled team of sales professionals. This leader should be familiar with generating, developing and closing software subscription (SaaS) opportunities. We are looking for a self-starter who can manage a team and make an immediate impact of selling our Backup and Cloud Storage solutions. In this role, the sales leader will work closely with the VP of Sales, marketing staff, and service staff to develop and implement specific strategic plans to achieve and exceed revenue targets, including new business acquisition as well as build out our customer success program.

Leadership: We have an experienced team who’s brought us to where we are today. You need to have the people and management skills to get them excited about working with you. You need to be a strong leader and compassionate about developing and supporting your team.

Data driven and creative: The data has to show something makes sense before we scale it up. However, without creativity, it’s easy to say “the data shows it’s impossible” or to find a local maximum. Whether it’s deciding how to scale the team, figuring out what our outbound sales efforts should look like or putting a plan in place to develop the team for career growth, we’ve seen a bit of creativity get us places a few extra dollars couldn’t.

Jive with our culture: Strong leaders affect culture and the person we hire for this role may well shape, not only fit into, ours. But to shape the culture you have to be accepted by the organism, which means a certain set of shared values. We default to openness with our team, our customers, and everyone if possible. We love initiative — without arrogance or dictatorship. We work to create a place people enjoy showing up to work. That doesn’t mean ping pong tables and foosball (though we do try to have perks & fun), but it means people are friendly, non-political, working to build a good service but also a good place to work.

Do the work: Ideas and strategy are critical, but good execution makes them happen. We’re looking for someone who can help the team execute both from the perspective of being capable of guiding and organizing, but also someone who is hands-on themselves.

Additional Responsibilities needed for this role:

  • Recruit, coach, mentor, manage and lead a team of sales professionals to achieve yearly sales targets. This includes closing new business and expanding upon existing clientele.
  • Expand the customer success program to provide the best customer experience possible resulting in upsell opportunities and a high retention rate.
  • Develop effective sales strategies and deliver compelling product demonstrations and sales pitches.
  • Acquire and develop the appropriate sales tools to make the team efficient in their daily work flow.
  • Apply a thorough understanding of the marketplace, industry trends, funding developments, and products to all management activities and strategic sales decisions.
  • Ensure that sales department operations function smoothly, with the goal of facilitating sales and/or closings; operational responsibilities include accurate pipeline reporting and sales forecasts.
  • This position will report directly to the VP of Sales and will be staffed in our headquarters in San Mateo, CA.

  • 7 – 10+ years of successful sales leadership experience as measured by sales performance against goals.
    Experience in developing skill sets and providing career growth and opportunities through advancement of team members.
  • Background in selling SaaS technologies with a strong track record of success.
  • Strong presentation and communication skills.
  • Must be able to travel occasionally nationwide.
  • BA/BS degree required

Think you want to join us on this adventure?
Send an email to jobscontact@backblaze.com with the subject “Director of Sales.” (Recruiters and agencies, please don’t email us.) Include a resume and answer these two questions:

  1. How would you approach evaluating the current sales team and what is your process for developing a growth strategy to scale the team?
  2. What are the goals you would set for yourself in the 3 month and 1-year timeframes?

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope that this sounds like the opportunity for which you’ve been waiting.

Backblaze is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

The post Hiring a Director of Sales appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Randomly generated, thermal-printed comics

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/random-comic-strip-generation-vomit-comic-robot/

Python code creates curious, wordless comic strips at random, spewing them from the thermal printer mouth of a laser-cut body reminiscent of Disney Pixar’s WALL-E: meet the Vomit Comic Robot!

The age of the thermal printer!

Thermal printers allow you to instantly print photos, data, and text using a few lines of code, with no need for ink. More and more makers are using this handy, low-maintenance bit of kit for truly creative projects, from Pierre Muth’s tiny PolaPi-Zero camera to the sound-printing Waves project by Eunice Lee, Matthew Zhang, and Bomani McClendon (and our own Secret Santa Babbage).

Vomiting robots

Interaction designer and developer Cadin Batrack, whose background is in game design and interactivity, has built the Vomit Comic Robot, which creates “one-of-a-kind comics on demand by processing hand-drawn images through a custom software algorithm.”

The robot is made up of a Raspberry Pi 3, a USB thermal printer, and a handful of LEDs.

Comic Vomit Robot Cadin Batrack's Raspberry Pi comic-generating thermal printer machine

At the press of a button, Processing code selects one of a set of Cadin’s hand-drawn empty comic grids and then randomly picks images from a library to fill in the gaps.

Vomit Comic Robot Cadin Batrack's Raspberry Pi comic-generating thermal printer machine

Each image is associated with data that allows the code to fit it correctly into the available panels. Cadin says about the concept behing his build:

Although images are selected and placed randomly, the comic panel format suggests relationships between elements. Our minds create a story where there is none in an attempt to explain visuals created by a non-intelligent machine.

The Raspberry Pi saves the final image as a high-resolution PNG file (so that Cadin can sell prints on thick paper via Etsy), and a Python script sends it to be vomited up by the thermal printer.

Comic Vomit Robot Cadin Batrack's Raspberry Pi comic-generating thermal printer machine

For more about the Vomit Comic Robot, check out Cadin’s blog. If you want to recreate it, you can find the info you need in the Imgur album he has put together.

We ❤ cute robots

We have a soft spot for cute robots here at Pi Towers, and of course we make no exception for the Vomit Comic Robot. If, like us, you’re a fan of adorable bots, check out Mira, the tiny interactive robot by Alonso Martinez, and Peeqo, the GIF bot by Abhishek Singh.

Mira Alfonso Martinez Raspberry Pi

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Replacing macOS Server with Synology NAS

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/replacing-macos-server-with-synology-nas/

Synology NAS boxes backed up to the cloud

Businesses and organizations that rely on macOS server for essential office and data services are facing some decisions about the future of their IT services.

Apple recently announced that it is deprecating a significant portion of essential network services in macOS Server, as they described in a support statement posted on April 24, 2018, “Prepare for changes to macOS Server.” Apple’s note includes:

macOS Server is changing to focus more on management of computers, devices, and storage on your network. As a result, some changes are coming in how Server works. A number of services will be deprecated, and will be hidden on new installations of an update to macOS Server coming in spring 2018.

The note lists the services that will be removed in a future release of macOS Server, including calendar and contact support, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Domain Name Services (DNS), mail, instant messages, virtual private networking (VPN), NetInstall, Web server, and the Wiki.

Apple assures users who have already configured any of the listed services that they will be able to use them in the spring 2018 macOS Server update, but the statement ends with links to a number of alternative services, including hosted services, that macOS Server users should consider as viable replacements to the features it is removing. These alternative services are all FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software).

As difficult as this could be for organizations that use macOS server, this is not unexpected. Apple left the server hardware space back in 2010, when Steve Jobs announced the company was ending its line of Xserve rackmount servers, which were introduced in May, 2002. Since then, macOS Server has hardly been a prominent part of Apple’s product lineup. It’s not just the product itself that has lost some luster, but the entire category of SMB office and business servers, which has been undergoing a gradual change in recent years.

Some might wonder how important the news about macOS Server is, given that macOS Server represents a pretty small share of the server market. macOS Server has been important to design shops, agencies, education users, and small businesses that likely have been on Macs for ages, but it’s not a significant part of the IT infrastructure of larger organizations and businesses.

What Comes After macOS Server?

Lovers of macOS Server don’t have to fear having their Mac minis pried from their cold, dead hands quite yet. Installed services will continue to be available. In the fall of 2018, new installations and upgrades of macOS Server will require users to migrate most services to other software. Since many of the services of macOS Server were already open-source, this means that a change in software might not be required. It does mean more configuration and management required from those who continue with macOS Server, however.

Users can continue with macOS Server if they wish, but many will see the writing on the wall and look for a suitable substitute.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

For many people working in organizations, what is significant about this announcement is how it reflects the move away from the once ubiquitous server-based IT infrastructure. Services that used to be centrally managed and office-based, such as storage, file sharing, communications, and computing, have moved to the cloud.

In selecting the next office IT platforms, there’s an opportunity to move to solutions that reflect and support how people are working and the applications they are using both in the office and remotely. For many, this means including cloud-based services in office automation, backup, and business continuity/disaster recovery planning. This includes Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service (Saas, PaaS, IaaS) options.

IT solutions that integrate well with the cloud are worth strong consideration for what comes after a macOS Server-based environment.

Synology NAS as a macOS Server Alternative

One solution that is becoming popular is to replace macOS Server with a device that has the ability to provide important office services, but also bridges the office and cloud environments. Using Network-Attached Storage (NAS) to take up the server slack makes a lot of sense. Many customers are already using NAS for file sharing, local data backup, automatic cloud backup, and other uses. In the case of Synology, their operating system, Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM), is Linux based, and integrates the basic functions of file sharing, centralized backup, RAID storage, multimedia streaming, virtual storage, and other common functions.

Synology NAS box

Synology NAS

Since DSM is based on Linux, there are numerous server applications available, including many of the same ones that are available for macOS Server, which shares conceptual roots with Linux as it comes from BSD Unix.

Synology DiskStation Manager Package Center screenshot

Synology DiskStation Manager Package Center

According to Ed Lukacs, COO at 2FIFTEEN Systems Management in Salt Lake City, their customers have found the move from macOS Server to Synology NAS not only painless, but positive. DSM works seamlessly with macOS and has been faster for their customers, as well. Many of their customers are running Adobe Creative Suite and Google G Suite applications, so a workflow that combines local storage, remote access, and the cloud, is already well known to them. Remote users are supported by Synology’s QuickConnect or VPN.

Business continuity and backup are simplified by the flexible storage capacity of the NAS. Synology has built-in backup to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage with Synology’s Cloud Sync, as well as a choice of a number of other B2-compatible applications, such as Cloudberry, Comet, and Arq.

Customers have been able to get up and running quickly, with only initial data transfers requiring some time to complete. After that, management of the NAS can be handled in-house or with the support of a Managed Service Provider (MSP).

Are You Sticking with macOS Server or Moving to Another Platform?

If you’re affected by this change in macOS Server, please let us know in the comments how you’re planning to cope. Are you using Synology NAS for server services? Please tell us how that’s working for you.

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Working with the Scout Association on digital skills for life

Post Syndicated from Philip Colligan original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/working-with-scout-association-digital-skills-for-life/

Today we’re launching a new partnership between the Scouts and the Raspberry Pi Foundation that will help tens of thousands of young people learn crucial digital skills for life. In this blog post, I want to explain what we’ve got planned, why it matters, and how you can get involved.

This is personal

First, let me tell you why this partnership matters to me. As a child growing up in North Wales in the 1980s, Scouting changed my life. My time with 2nd Rhyl provided me with countless opportunities to grow and develop new skills. It taught me about teamwork and community in ways that continue to shape my decisions today.

As my own kids (now seven and ten) have joined Scouting, I’ve seen the same opportunities opening up for them, and like so many parents, I’ve come back to the movement as a volunteer to support their local section. So this is deeply personal for me, and the same is true for many of my colleagues at the Raspberry Pi Foundation who in different ways have been part of the Scouting movement.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Scouting and Raspberry Pi share many of the same values. We are both community-led movements that aim to help young people develop the skills they need for life. We are both powered by an amazing army of volunteers who give their time to support that mission. We both care about inclusiveness, and pride ourselves on combining fun with learning by doing.

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi started life in 2008 as a response to the problem that too many young people were growing up without the skills to create with technology. Our goal is that everyone should be able to harness the power of computing and digital technologies, for work, to solve problems that matter to them, and to express themselves creatively.

In 2012 we launched our first product, the world’s first $35 computer. Just six years on, we have sold over 20 million Raspberry Pi computers and helped kickstart a global movement for digital skills.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation now runs the world’s largest network of volunteer-led computing clubs (Code Clubs and CoderDojos), and creates free educational resources that are used by millions of young people all over the world to learn how to create with digital technologies. And lots of what we are able to achieve is because of partnerships with fantastic organisations that share our goals. For example, through our partnership with the European Space Agency, thousands of young people have written code that has run on two Raspberry Pi computers that Tim Peake took to the International Space Station as part of his Mission Principia.

Digital makers

Today we’re launching the new Digital Maker Staged Activity Badge to help tens of thousands of young people learn how to create with technology through Scouting. Over the past few months, we’ve been working with the Scouts all over the UK to develop and test the new badge requirements, along with guidance, project ideas, and resources that really make them work for Scouting. We know that we need to get two things right: relevance and accessibility.

Relevance is all about making sure that the activities and resources we provide are a really good fit for Scouting and Scouting’s mission to equip young people with skills for life. From the digital compass to nature cameras and the reinvented wide game, we’ve had a lot of fun thinking about ways we can bring to life the crucial role that digital technologies can play in the outdoors and adventure.

Compass Coding with Raspberry Pi

We are beyond excited to be launching a new partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which will help tens of thousands of young people learn digital skills for life.

We also know that there are great opportunities for Scouts to use digital technologies to solve social problems in their communities, reflecting the movement’s commitment to social action. Today we’re launching the first set of project ideas and resources, with many more to follow over the coming weeks and months.

Accessibility is about providing every Scout leader with the confidence, support, and kit to enable them to offer the Digital Maker Staged Activity Badge to their young people. A lot of work and care has gone into designing activities that require very little equipment: for example, activities at Stages 1 and 2 can be completed with a laptop without access to the internet. For the activities that do require kit, we will be working with Scout Stores and districts to make low-cost kit available to buy or loan.

We’re producing accessible instructions, worksheets, and videos to help leaders run sessions with confidence, and we’ll also be planning training for leaders. We will work with our network of Code Clubs and CoderDojos to connect them with local sections to organise joint activities, bringing both kit and expertise along with them.

Get involved

Today’s launch is just the start. We’ll be developing our partnership over the next few years, and we can’t wait for you to join us in getting more young people making things with technology.

Take a look at the brand-new Raspberry Pi resources designed especially for Scouts, to get young people making and creating right away.

The post Working with the Scout Association on digital skills for life appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

AWS IoT 1-Click – Use Simple Devices to Trigger Lambda Functions

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-iot-1-click-use-simple-devices-to-trigger-lambda-functions/

We announced a preview of AWS IoT 1-Click at AWS re:Invent 2017 and have been refining it ever since, focusing on simplicity and a clean out-of-box experience. Designed to make IoT available and accessible to a broad audience, AWS IoT 1-Click is now generally available, along with new IoT buttons from AWS and AT&T.

I sat down with the dev team a month or two ago to learn about the service so that I could start thinking about my blog post. During the meeting they gave me a pair of IoT buttons and I started to think about some creative ways to put them to use. Here are a few that I came up with:

Help Request – Earlier this month I spent a very pleasant weekend at the HackTillDawn hackathon in Los Angeles. As the participants were hacking away, they occasionally had questions about AWS, machine learning, Amazon SageMaker, and AWS DeepLens. While we had plenty of AWS Solution Architects on hand (decked out in fashionable & distinctive AWS shirts for easy identification), I imagined an IoT button for each team. Pressing the button would alert the SA crew via SMS and direct them to the proper table.

Camera ControlTim Bray and I were in the AWS video studio, prepping for the first episode of Tim’s series on AWS Messaging. Minutes before we opened the Twitch stream I realized that we did not have a clean, unobtrusive way to ask the camera operator to switch to a closeup view. Again, I imagined that a couple of IoT buttons would allow us to make the request.

Remote Dog Treat Dispenser – My dog barks every time a stranger opens the gate in front of our house. While it is great to have confirmation that my Ring doorbell is working, I would like to be able to press a button and dispense a treat so that Luna stops barking!

Homes, offices, factories, schools, vehicles, and health care facilities can all benefit from IoT buttons and other simple IoT devices, all managed using AWS IoT 1-Click.

All About AWS IoT 1-Click
As I said earlier, we have been focusing on simplicity and a clean out-of-box experience. Here’s what that means:

Architects can dream up applications for inexpensive, low-powered devices.

Developers don’t need to write any device-level code. They can make use of pre-built actions, which send email or SMS messages, or write their own custom actions using AWS Lambda functions.

Installers don’t have to install certificates or configure cloud endpoints on newly acquired devices, and don’t have to worry about firmware updates.

Administrators can monitor the overall status and health of each device, and can arrange to receive alerts when a device nears the end of its useful life and needs to be replaced, using a single interface that spans device types and manufacturers.

I’ll show you how easy this is in just a moment. But first, let’s talk about the current set of devices that are supported by AWS IoT 1-Click.

Who’s Got the Button?
We’re launching with support for two types of buttons (both pictured above). Both types of buttons are pre-configured with X.509 certificates, communicate to the cloud over secure connections, and are ready to use.

The AWS IoT Enterprise Button communicates via Wi-Fi. It has a 2000-click lifetime, encrypts outbound data using TLS, and can be configured using BLE and our mobile app. It retails for $19.99 (shipping and handling not included) and can be used in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

The AT&T LTE-M Button communicates via the LTE-M cellular network. It has a 1500-click lifetime, and also encrypts outbound data using TLS. The device and the bundled data plan is available an an introductory price of $29.99 (shipping and handling not included), and can be used in the United States.

We are very interested in working with device manufacturers in order to make even more shapes, sizes, and types of devices (badge readers, asset trackers, motion detectors, and industrial sensors, to name a few) available to our customers. Our team will be happy to tell you about our provisioning tools and our facility for pushing OTA (over the air) updates to large fleets of devices; you can contact them at [email protected].

AWS IoT 1-Click Concepts
I’m eager to show you how to use AWS IoT 1-Click and the buttons, but need to introduce a few concepts first.

Device – A button or other item that can send messages. Each device is uniquely identified by a serial number.

Placement Template – Describes a like-minded collection of devices to be deployed. Specifies the action to be performed and lists the names of custom attributes for each device.

Placement – A device that has been deployed. Referring to placements instead of devices gives you the freedom to replace and upgrade devices with minimal disruption. Each placement can include values for custom attributes such as a location (“Building 8, 3rd Floor, Room 1337”) or a purpose (“Coffee Request Button”).

Action – The AWS Lambda function to invoke when the button is pressed. You can write a function from scratch, or you can make use of a pair of predefined functions that send an email or an SMS message. The actions have access to the attributes; you can, for example, send an SMS message with the text “Urgent need for coffee in Building 8, 3rd Floor, Room 1337.”

Getting Started with AWS IoT 1-Click
Let’s set up an IoT button using the AWS IoT 1-Click Console:

If I didn’t have any buttons I could click Buy devices to get some. But, I do have some, so I click Claim devices to move ahead. I enter the device ID or claim code for my AT&T button and click Claim (I can enter multiple claim codes or device IDs if I want):

The AWS buttons can be claimed using the console or the mobile app; the first step is to use the mobile app to configure the button to use my Wi-Fi:

Then I scan the barcode on the box and click the button to complete the process of claiming the device. Both of my buttons are now visible in the console:

I am now ready to put them to use. I click on Projects, and then Create a project:

I name and describe my project, and click Next to proceed:

Now I define a device template, along with names and default values for the placement attributes. Here’s how I set up a device template (projects can contain several, but I just need one):

The action has two mandatory parameters (phone number and SMS message) built in; I add three more (Building, Room, and Floor) and click Create project:

I’m almost ready to ask for some coffee! The next step is to associate my buttons with this project by creating a placement for each one. I click Create placements to proceed. I name each placement, select the device to associate with it, and then enter values for the attributes that I established for the project. I can also add additional attributes that are peculiar to this placement:

I can inspect my project and see that everything looks good:

I click on the buttons and the SMS messages appear:

I can monitor device activity in the AWS IoT 1-Click Console:

And also in the Lambda Console:

The Lambda function itself is also accessible, and can be used as-is or customized:

As you can see, this is the code that lets me use {{*}}include all of the placement attributes in the message and {{Building}} (for example) to include a specific placement attribute.

Now Available
I’ve barely scratched the surface of this cool new service and I encourage you to give it a try (or a click) yourself. Buy a button or two, build something cool, and let me know all about it!

Pricing is based on the number of enabled devices in your account, measured monthly and pro-rated for partial months. Devices can be enabled or disabled at any time. See the AWS IoT 1-Click Pricing page for more info.

To learn more, visit the AWS IoT 1-Click home page or read the AWS IoT 1-Click documentation.

Amazon Sumerian – Now Generally Available

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-sumerian-now-generally-available/

We announced Amazon Sumerian at AWS re:Invent 2017. As you can see from Tara‘s blog post (Presenting Amazon Sumerian: An Easy Way to Create VR, AR, and 3D Experiences), Sumerian does not require any specialized programming or 3D graphics expertise. You can build VR, AR, and 3D experiences for a wide variety of popular hardware platforms including mobile devices, head-mounted displays, digital signs, and web browsers.

I’m happy to announce that Sumerian is now generally available. You can create realistic virtual environments and scenes without having to acquire or master specialized tools for 3D modeling, animation, lighting, audio editing, or programming. Once built, you can deploy your finished creation across multiple platforms without having to write custom code or deal with specialized deployment systems and processes.

Sumerian gives you a web-based editor that you can use to quickly and easily create realistic, professional-quality scenes. There’s a visual scripting tool that lets you build logic to control how objects and characters (Sumerian Hosts) respond to user actions. Sumerian also lets you create rich, natural interactions powered by AWS services such as Amazon Lex, Polly, AWS Lambda, AWS IoT, and Amazon DynamoDB.

Sumerian was designed to work on multiple platforms. The VR and AR apps that you create in Sumerian will run in browsers that supports WebGL or WebVR and on popular devices such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and those powered by iOS or Android.

During the preview period, we have been working with a broad spectrum of customers to put Sumerian to the test and to create proof of concept (PoC) projects designed to highlight an equally broad spectrum of use cases, including employee education, training simulations, field service productivity, virtual concierge, design and creative, and brand engagement. Fidelity Labs (the internal R&D unit of Fidelity Investments), was the first to use a Sumerian host to create an engaging VR experience. Cora (the host) lives within a virtual chart room. She can display stock quotes, pull up company charts, and answer questions about a company’s performance. This PoC uses Amazon Polly to implement text to speech and Amazon Lex for conversational chatbot functionality. Read their blog post and watch the video inside to see Cora in action:

Now that Sumerian is generally available, you have the power to create engaging AR, VR, and 3D experiences of your own. To learn more, visit the Amazon Sumerian home page and then spend some quality time with our extensive collection of Sumerian Tutorials.

Analyze Apache Parquet optimized data using Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift

Post Syndicated from Roy Hasson original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/analyzing-apache-parquet-optimized-data-using-amazon-kinesis-data-firehose-amazon-athena-and-amazon-redshift/

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest way to capture and stream data into a data lake built on Amazon S3. This data can be anything—from AWS service logs like AWS CloudTrail log files, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, Application Load Balancer logs, and others. It can also be IoT events, game events, and much more. To efficiently query this data, a time-consuming ETL (extract, transform, and load) process is required to massage and convert the data to an optimal file format, which increases the time to insight. This situation is less than ideal, especially for real-time data that loses its value over time.

To solve this common challenge, Kinesis Data Firehose can now save data to Amazon S3 in Apache Parquet or Apache ORC format. These are optimized columnar formats that are highly recommended for best performance and cost-savings when querying data in S3. This feature directly benefits you if you use Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue, Amazon EMR, or any other big data tools that are available from the AWS Partner Network and through the open-source community.

Amazon Connect is a simple-to-use, cloud-based contact center service that makes it easy for any business to provide a great customer experience at a lower cost than common alternatives. Its open platform design enables easy integration with other systems. One of those systems is Amazon Kinesis—in particular, Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Data Firehose.

What’s really exciting is that you can now save events from Amazon Connect to S3 in Apache Parquet format. You can then perform analytics using Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift Spectrum in real time, taking advantage of this key performance and cost optimization. Of course, Amazon Connect is only one example. This new capability opens the door for a great deal of opportunity, especially as organizations continue to build their data lakes.

Amazon Connect includes an array of analytics views in the Administrator dashboard. But you might want to run other types of analysis. In this post, I describe how to set up a data stream from Amazon Connect through Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Data Firehose and out to S3, and then perform analytics using Athena and Amazon Redshift Spectrum. I focus primarily on the Kinesis Data Firehose support for Parquet and its integration with the AWS Glue Data Catalog, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift.

Solution overview

Here is how the solution is laid out:

The following sections walk you through each of these steps to set up the pipeline.

1. Define the schema

When Kinesis Data Firehose processes incoming events and converts the data to Parquet, it needs to know which schema to apply. The reason is that many times, incoming events contain all or some of the expected fields based on which values the producers are advertising. A typical process is to normalize the schema during a batch ETL job so that you end up with a consistent schema that can easily be understood and queried. Doing this introduces latency due to the nature of the batch process. To overcome this issue, Kinesis Data Firehose requires the schema to be defined in advance.

To see the available columns and structures, see Amazon Connect Agent Event Streams. For the purpose of simplicity, I opted to make all the columns of type String rather than create the nested structures. But you can definitely do that if you want.

The simplest way to define the schema is to create a table in the Amazon Athena console. Open the Athena console, and paste the following create table statement, substituting your own S3 bucket and prefix for where your event data will be stored. A Data Catalog database is a logical container that holds the different tables that you can create. The default database name shown here should already exist. If it doesn’t, you can create it or use another database that you’ve already created.

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE default.kfhconnectblog (
  awsaccountid string,
  agentarn string,
  currentagentsnapshot string,
  eventid string,
  eventtimestamp string,
  eventtype string,
  instancearn string,
  previousagentsnapshot string,
  version string
STORED AS parquet
LOCATION 's3://your_bucket/kfhconnectblog/'
TBLPROPERTIES ("parquet.compression"="SNAPPY")

That’s all you have to do to prepare the schema for Kinesis Data Firehose.

2. Define the data streams

Next, you need to define the Kinesis data streams that will be used to stream the Amazon Connect events.  Open the Kinesis Data Streams console and create two streams.  You can configure them with only one shard each because you don’t have a lot of data right now.

3. Define the Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream for Parquet

Let’s configure the Data Firehose delivery stream using the data stream as the source and Amazon S3 as the output. Start by opening the Kinesis Data Firehose console and creating a new data delivery stream. Give it a name, and associate it with the Kinesis data stream that you created in Step 2.

As shown in the following screenshot, enable Record format conversion (1) and choose Apache Parquet (2). As you can see, Apache ORC is also supported. Scroll down and provide the AWS Glue Data Catalog database name (3) and table names (4) that you created in Step 1. Choose Next.

To make things easier, the output S3 bucket and prefix fields are automatically populated using the values that you defined in the LOCATION parameter of the create table statement from Step 1. Pretty cool. Additionally, you have the option to save the raw events into another location as defined in the Source record S3 backup section. Don’t forget to add a trailing forward slash “ / “ so that Data Firehose creates the date partitions inside that prefix.

On the next page, in the S3 buffer conditions section, there is a note about configuring a large buffer size. The Parquet file format is highly efficient in how it stores and compresses data. Increasing the buffer size allows you to pack more rows into each output file, which is preferred and gives you the most benefit from Parquet.

Compression using Snappy is automatically enabled for both Parquet and ORC. You can modify the compression algorithm by using the Kinesis Data Firehose API and update the OutputFormatConfiguration.

Be sure to also enable Amazon CloudWatch Logs so that you can debug any issues that you might run into.

Lastly, finalize the creation of the Firehose delivery stream, and continue on to the next section.

4. Set up the Amazon Connect contact center

After setting up the Kinesis pipeline, you now need to set up a simple contact center in Amazon Connect. The Getting Started page provides clear instructions on how to set up your environment, acquire a phone number, and create an agent to accept calls.

After setting up the contact center, in the Amazon Connect console, choose your Instance Alias, and then choose Data Streaming. Under Agent Event, choose the Kinesis data stream that you created in Step 2, and then choose Save.

At this point, your pipeline is complete.  Agent events from Amazon Connect are generated as agents go about their day. Events are sent via Kinesis Data Streams to Kinesis Data Firehose, which converts the event data from JSON to Parquet and stores it in S3. Athena and Amazon Redshift Spectrum can simply query the data without any additional work.

So let’s generate some data. Go back into the Administrator console for your Amazon Connect contact center, and create an agent to handle incoming calls. In this example, I creatively named mine Agent One. After it is created, Agent One can get to work and log into their console and set their availability to Available so that they are ready to receive calls.

To make the data a bit more interesting, I also created a second agent, Agent Two. I then made some incoming and outgoing calls and caused some failures to occur, so I now have enough data available to analyze.

5. Analyze the data with Athena

Let’s open the Athena console and run some queries. One thing you’ll notice is that when we created the schema for the dataset, we defined some of the fields as Strings even though in the documentation they were complex structures.  The reason for doing that was simply to show some of the flexibility of Athena to be able to parse JSON data. However, you can define nested structures in your table schema so that Kinesis Data Firehose applies the appropriate schema to the Parquet file.

Let’s run the first query to see which agents have logged into the system.

The query might look complex, but it’s fairly straightforward:

WITH dataset AS (
    from_iso8601_timestamp(eventtimestamp) AS event_ts,
      '$.agentstatus.name') AS current_status,
        '$.agentstatus.starttimestamp')) AS current_starttimestamp,
      '$.configuration.firstname') AS current_firstname,
      '$.configuration.lastname') AS current_lastname,
      '$.configuration.username') AS current_username,
      '$.configuration.routingprofile.defaultoutboundqueue.name') AS               current_outboundqueue,
      '$.configuration.routingprofile.inboundqueues[0].name') as current_inboundqueue,
      '$.agentstatus.name') as prev_status,
       '$.agentstatus.starttimestamp')) as prev_starttimestamp,
      '$.configuration.firstname') as prev_firstname,
      '$.configuration.lastname') as prev_lastname,
      '$.configuration.username') as prev_username,
      '$.configuration.routingprofile.defaultoutboundqueue.name') as current_outboundqueue,
      '$.configuration.routingprofile.inboundqueues[0].name') as prev_inboundqueue
  from kfhconnectblog
  where eventtype <> 'HEART_BEAT'
  current_status as status,
  current_username as username,
FROM dataset
WHERE eventtype = 'LOGIN' AND current_username <> ''
ORDER BY event_ts DESC

The query output looks something like this:

Here is another query that shows the sessions each of the agents engaged with. It tells us where they were incoming or outgoing, if they were completed, and where there were missed or failed calls.

WITH src AS (
     json_extract_scalar(currentagentsnapshot, '$.configuration.username') as username,
     cast(json_extract(currentagentsnapshot, '$.contacts') AS ARRAY(JSON)) as c,
     cast(json_extract(previousagentsnapshot, '$.contacts') AS ARRAY(JSON)) as p
  from kfhconnectblog
src2 AS (
  FROM src CROSS JOIN UNNEST (c, p) AS contacts(c_item, p_item)
dataset AS (
  json_extract_scalar(c_item, '$.contactid') as c_contactid,
  json_extract_scalar(c_item, '$.channel') as c_channel,
  json_extract_scalar(c_item, '$.initiationmethod') as c_direction,
  json_extract_scalar(c_item, '$.queue.name') as c_queue,
  json_extract_scalar(c_item, '$.state') as c_state,
  from_iso8601_timestamp(json_extract_scalar(c_item, '$.statestarttimestamp')) as c_ts,
  json_extract_scalar(p_item, '$.contactid') as p_contactid,
  json_extract_scalar(p_item, '$.channel') as p_channel,
  json_extract_scalar(p_item, '$.initiationmethod') as p_direction,
  json_extract_scalar(p_item, '$.queue.name') as p_queue,
  json_extract_scalar(p_item, '$.state') as p_state,
  from_iso8601_timestamp(json_extract_scalar(p_item, '$.statestarttimestamp')) as p_ts
FROM src2
  c_channel as channel,
  c_direction as direction,
  p_state as prev_state,
  c_state as current_state,
  c_ts as current_ts,
  c_contactid as id
FROM dataset
WHERE c_contactid = p_contactid
ORDER BY id DESC, current_ts ASC

The query output looks similar to the following:

6. Analyze the data with Amazon Redshift Spectrum

With Amazon Redshift Spectrum, you can query data directly in S3 using your existing Amazon Redshift data warehouse cluster. Because the data is already in Parquet format, Redshift Spectrum gets the same great benefits that Athena does.

Here is a simple query to show querying the same data from Amazon Redshift. Note that to do this, you need to first create an external schema in Amazon Redshift that points to the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

  json_extract_path_text(currentagentsnapshot,'agentstatus','name') AS current_status,
  json_extract_path_text(currentagentsnapshot, 'configuration','firstname') AS current_firstname,
  json_extract_path_text(currentagentsnapshot, 'configuration','lastname') AS current_lastname,
    'configuration','routingprofile','defaultoutboundqueue','name') AS current_outboundqueue,
FROM default_schema.kfhconnectblog

The following shows the query output:

In this post, I showed you how to use Kinesis Data Firehose to ingest and convert data to columnar file format, enabling real-time analysis using Athena and Amazon Redshift. This great feature enables a level of optimization in both cost and performance that you need when storing and analyzing large amounts of data. This feature is equally important if you are investing in building data lakes on AWS.

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Analyzing VPC Flow Logs with Amazon Kinesis Firehose, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight and Work with partitioned data in AWS Glue.

About the Author

Roy Hasson is a Global Business Development Manager for AWS Analytics. He works with customers around the globe to design solutions to meet their data processing, analytics and business intelligence needs. Roy is big Manchester United fan cheering his team on and hanging out with his family.

Amazon Aurora Backtrack – Turn Back Time

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-backtrack-turn-back-time/

We’ve all been there! You need to make a quick, seemingly simple fix to an important production database. You compose the query, give it a once-over, and let it run. Seconds later you realize that you forgot the WHERE clause, dropped the wrong table, or made another serious mistake, and interrupt the query, but the damage has been done. You take a deep breath, whistle through your teeth, wish that reality came with an Undo option. Now what?

New Amazon Aurora Backtrack
Today I would like to tell you about the new backtrack feature for Amazon Aurora. This is as close as we can come, given present-day technology, to an Undo option for reality.

This feature can be enabled at launch time for all newly-launched Aurora database clusters. To enable it, you simply specify how far back in time you might want to rewind, and use the database as usual (this is on the Configure advanced settings page):

Aurora uses a distributed, log-structured storage system (read Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases to learn a lot more); each change to your database generates a new log record, identified by a Log Sequence Number (LSN). Enabling the backtrack feature provisions a FIFO buffer in the cluster for storage of LSNs. This allows for quick access and recovery times measured in seconds.

After that regrettable moment when all seems lost, you simply pause your application, open up the Aurora Console, select the cluster, and click Backtrack DB cluster:

Then you select Backtrack and choose the point in time just before your epic fail, and click Backtrack DB cluster:

Then you wait for the rewind to take place, unpause your application and proceed as if nothing had happened. When you initiate a backtrack, Aurora will pause the database, close any open connections, drop uncommitted writes, and wait for the backtrack to complete. Then it will resume normal operation and being to accept requests. The instance state will be backtracking while the rewind is underway:

The console will let you know when the backtrack is complete:

If it turns out that you went back a bit too far, you can backtrack to a later time. Other Aurora features such as cloning, backups, and restores continue to work on an instance that has been configured for backtrack.

I’m sure you can think of some creative and non-obvious use cases for this cool new feature. For example, you could use it to restore a test database after running a test that makes changes to the database. You can initiate the restoration from the API or the CLI, making it easy to integrate into your existing test framework.

Things to Know
This option applies to newly created MySQL-compatible Aurora database clusters and to MySQL-compatible clusters that have been restored from a backup. You must opt-in when you create or restore a cluster; you cannot enable it for a running cluster.

This feature is available now in all AWS Regions where Amazon Aurora runs, and you can start using it today.

Hello World Issue 5: Engineering

Post Syndicated from Russell Barnes original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/hello-world-issue-5/

Join us as we celebrate the Year of Engineering in the newest issue of Hello World, our magazine for computing and digital making educators.

Inspiring future engineers

We’ve brought together a wide range of experts to share their ideas and advice on how to bring engineering to your classroom — read issue 5 to find out the best ways to inspire the next generation.

Plus we’ve got plenty on GP and Scratch, we answer your latest questions, and we bring you our usual collection of useful features, guides, and lesson plans.

Highlights of issue 5 include:

  • The bluffers’ guide to putting together a tech-themed school trip
  • Inclusion, and coding for the visually impaired
  • Getting students interested in databases
  • Why copying may not always be a bad thing

How to get Hello World #5

Hello World is available as a free download under a Creative Commons license for everyone in world who is interested in computer science and digital making education. Get the latest issue as a PDF file straight from the Hello World website.

We’re currently offering free print copies of the magazine to serving educators in the UK. This offer is open to teachers, Code Club and CoderDojo volunteers, teaching assistants, teacher trainers, and others who help children and young people learn about computing and digital making. Subscribe to have your free print magazine posted directly to your home, or subscribe digitally — 20000 educators have already signed up to receive theirs!

Get in touch!

You could write for us about your experiences as an educator, and share your advice with the community. Wherever you are in the world, get in touch by emailing our editorial team about your article idea — we would love to hear from you!

Hello World magazine is a collaboration between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Computing At School, which is part of the British Computing Society.

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Invent new sounds with Google’s NSynth Super

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/google-nsynth-super/

Discover new sounds and explore the role of machine learning in music production and sound research with the NSynth Super, an ongoing project from Google’s Magenta research team that you can build at home.

Google Open NSynth Super Testing

Uploaded by AB Open on 2018-04-17.

What is the NSynth Super?

Part of the ongoing Magenta research project within Google, NSynth Super explores the ways in which machine learning tools help artists and musicians be creative.

Google Nsynth Super Raspberry Pi

“Technology has always played a role in creating new types of sounds that inspire musicians — from the sounds of distortion to the electronic sounds of synths,” explains the team behind the NSynth Super. “Today, advances in machine learning and neural networks have opened up new possibilities for sound generation.”

Using TensorFlow, the Magenta team builds tools and interfaces that let  artists and musicians use machine learning in their work. The NSynth Super AI algorithm uses deep neural networking to investigate the character of sounds. It then builds new sounds based on these characteristics instead of simply mixing sounds together.

Using an autoencoder, it extracts 16 defining temporal features from each input. These features are then interpolated linearly to create new embeddings (mathematical representations of each sound). These new embeddings are then decoded into new sounds, which have the acoustic qualities of both inputs.

The team publishes all hardware designs and software that are part of their ongoing research under open-source licences, allowing you to build your own synth.

Build your own NSynth Super

Using these open-source tools, Andrew Black has produced his own NSynth Super, demoed in the video above. Andrew’s list of build materials includes a Raspberry Pi 3, potentiometers, rotary encoders, and the Adafruit 1.3″ OLED display. Magenta also provides Gerber files for you to fabricate your own PCB.

Google Nsynth Super Raspberry Pi

Once fabricated, the PCB includes a table of contents for adding components.

The build isn’t easy — it requires soldering skills or access to someone who can assemble PCBs. Take a look at Andrew’s blog post and the official NSynth GitHub repo to see whether you’re up to the challenge.

Google Nsynth Super Raspberry Pi
Google Nsynth Super Raspberry Pi
Google Nsynth Super Raspberry Pi

Music and Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi has been widely used for music production and music builds. Be it retrofitting a boombox, distributing music atop Table Mountain, or coding tracks with Sonic Pi, the Pi offers endless opportunities for musicians and music lovers to expand their repertoire of builds and instruments.

If you’d like to try more music-based projects using the Raspberry Pi, you can check out our free resources. And if you’ve used a Raspberry Pi in your own musical project, please share it with us in the comments or via our social network accounts.

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Announcing Coolest Projects North America

Post Syndicated from Courtney Lentz original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/coolest-projects-north-america/

The Raspberry Pi Foundation loves to celebrate people who use technology to solve problems and express themselves creatively, so we’re proud to expand the incredibly successful event Coolest Projects to North America. This free event will be held on Sunday 23 September 2018 at the Discovery Cube Orange County in Santa Ana, California.

Coolest Projects North America logo Raspberry Pi CoderDojo

What is Coolest Projects?

Coolest Projects is a world-leading showcase that empowers and inspires the next generation of digital creators, innovators, changemakers, and entrepreneurs. The event is both a competition and an exhibition to give young digital makers aged 7 to 17 a platform to celebrate their successes, creativity, and ingenuity.

showcase crowd — Coolest Projects North America

In 2012, Coolest Projects was conceived as an opportunity for CoderDojo Ninjas to showcase their work and for supporters to acknowledge these achievements. Week after week, Ninjas would meet up to work diligently on their projects, hacks, and code; however, it can be difficult for them to see their long-term progress on a project when they’re concentrating on its details on a weekly basis. Coolest Projects became a dedicated time each year for Ninjas and supporters to reflect, celebrate, and share both the achievements and challenges of the maker’s journey.

three female coolest projects attendees — Coolest Projects North America

Coolest Projects North America

Not only is Coolest Projects expanding to North America, it’s also expanding its participant pool! Members of our team have met so many amazing young people creating in all areas of the world, that it simply made sense to widen our outreach to include Code Clubs, students of Raspberry Pi Certified Educators, and members of the Raspberry Jam community at large as well as CoderDojo attendees.

 a boy showing a technology project to an old man, with a girl playing on a laptop on the floor — Coolest Projects North America

Exhibit and attend Coolest Projects

Coolest Projects is a free, family- and educator-friendly event. Young people can apply to exhibit their projects, and the general public can register to attend this one-day event. Be sure to register today, because you make Coolest Projects what it is: the coolest.

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Start a CoderDojo with our free online training

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/start-a-coderdojo-with-our-free-online-training/

You can now sign up to our newest free online course Start a CoderDojo to learn more about CoderDojo and how you can easily set up one of these free coding clubs for young people in your area. With less than two weeks until the course begins, we wanted to tell you about the course’s content and why the course’s creator put it together for you.

Start a CoderDojo || free online learning || Raspberry Pi Foundation

Get support and advice on how to grow your confidence in coding and start a CoderDojo for young people in your area.

What is CoderDojo?

CoderDojo is a global network of free, volunteer-led, community-based programming clubs for young people aged 7 to 17. There are currently more than 1700 Dojos running regularly across 75 countries. All of these clubs were started by individuals who are passionate about giving young people the opportunity to learn to code. Some people assume you need technical skills to start a Dojo, but that’s not true. The most important thing is that you can bring people together for a shared goal.

What is covered on the course?

The course was developed by Philip, CoderDojo’s Educational Content Lead. It gives those who think empowering young people to be tech creators is important the resources and supports to achieve that goal by starting a Dojo. Divided over three weeks and running for about four hours in total, the course provides practical advice and resources on everything you need to know to plan and run a fun, social, and creative coding club for young people.

“In the first week, you’ll look at what coding is, at the worldwide CoderDojo community of coding clubs, and at the creative approach CoderDojos take to helping young people learn to code. In week two, you’ll move on to setting up your Dojo with a team, a venue, and any needed materials. You’ll also look at how to find young people to attend. Week three wraps up the course by giving you sample plans for a Dojo session and a Dojo’s year, and we’ll be talking about how to grow and develop your Dojo over time as your attendees become better coders.”
— Philip

Who is the course for?

Anyone interested in enabling young people to be tech creators should take this course. Parents, teachers, librarians, IT professionals, youth workers, and others have all started Dojos in their community. They say that “it’s an amazing experience that led [them] to expand [their] personal horizons”, and that they “find it really rewarding”.

The course is free and open to all — if you’re interested, then sign up now.

If you’re already mentoring at a Dojo, the course is a great opportunity to revise what you’ve learnt, and a chance to share your insights with newcomers in the discussion sections. Parents and guardians who wish to learn more about CoderDojo and are considering getting involved are also more than welcome to join.

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Tinkernut’s hidden Coke bottle spy cam

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/tinkernuts-spy-cam/

Go undercover and keep an eye on your stuff with this brilliant secret Coke bottle spy cam from Tinkernut!

Secret Coke Bottle SPY CAM! – Weekend Hacker #1803

SPECIAL NOTE*** THE FULL TUTORIAL WILL BE AVAILABLE NEXT WEEK April Fools! What a terrible day. So many pranks. You can’t believe anything you read. People invading your space. The mental and physical anguish of enduring the day. It’s time to fight back! Let’s catch the perps in action by making a device that always watches.

Keeping tabs

A Raspberry Pi Zero W, a small camera, and a rechargeable Lithium Polymer (LiPo) battery constitute the bulk of this project’s tech. A pair of 3D-printed parts, and gelatine-solidified Coke Zero make up the fake fizzy body.

Tinkernut Coke bottle Raspberry Pi Spy Cam

“So let’s make this video as short as possible and just buy a cheap pre-made spy cam off of Amazon. Just kidding,” Tinkernut jokes in the tutorial video for the project, before going through the step-by-step process of using the Raspberry Pi to “DIY this the right way”.

After accessing the Zero W from his laptop via SSH, Tinkernut opted for using the rpi_camera_surveillance_system Python script written by GitHub user RuiSantosdotme to control the spy cam. Luckily, this meant no additional library setup, and basically no lag on the video feed.

What we want to do is create a script that activates the camera and serves it to a web page so that we can access it from any web browser. There are plenty of different ways to do this (Motion, Raspivid, etc), but I found a simple Python script that does everything I need it to do and doesn’t require any extra software or libraries to install. The best thing about it is that the lag time is practically unnoticeable.

With the code in place, every boot-up of the Raspberry Pi automatically launches both the script and a web page of the live video, allowing for constant monitoring of potential sneaks and thieves.

Tinkernut Coke bottle Raspberry Pi Spy Cam

The projects is powered by a 1500mAh LiPo battery and the Adafruit LiPo charger. It also includes a simple on/off switch, which Tinkernut wired to the charger and the Pi’s PP1 and PP6 connector pads.

Tinkernut Coke bottle Raspberry Pi Spy Cam

Tinkernut decided to use a Coke Zero bottle for the build, incorporating 3D-printed parts to house the Pi, and a mix of Coke and gelatine to create a realistic-looking filling for the bottle. However, the setup can be transferred to pretty much any hollow item in your home, say, a cookie jar or a cracker box. So get creative and get spying!

A complete spy cam how-to

If you’d like to make your own secret spy cam, you can find a tutorial for Tinkernut’s build at hackster.io, or follow along with his video below. Also make sure to subscribe his YouTube channel to be updated on all his newest builds — they’re rather splendid.

BUILD: Coke Bottle SPY CAM! – Tinkernut Workbench

Learn how to take a regular Coke Zero bottle, cram a Raspberry Pi and webcam inside of it, and have it still look like a regular Coke Zero bottle. Why would you want to do this? To spy on those irritating April Fooligans!!!

And if you’re interested in more spy-themed digital making projects, check out our complete 007 how-to guide for links to tutorials such as our Sense HAT puzzle box, Parent detector, and Laser tripwire.

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Raspberry Pi aboard Pino, the smart sailboat

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pino-smart-sailing-boat/

As they sail aboard their floating game design studio Pino, Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega are starting to explore the use of Raspberry Pis. As part of an experimental development tool and a weather station, Pis are now aiding them on their nautical adventures!

Mar 2018: A Smart Sailboat

Pino is on its way to becoming a smart sailboat! Raspberry Pi is the ideal device for sailors, we hope to make many more projects with it. Also the projects continue still, but we have windows now yay!

Using a haul of Pimoroni tech including the Enviro pHat, Scroll pHat HD and Mini Black HAT Hack3r, Rekka and Devine have been experimenting with using a Raspberry Pi Zero as an onboard barometer for their sailboat. On their Hundred Rabbits YouTube channel and website, the pair has documented their experimental setups. They have also built another Raspberry Pi rig for distraction-free work and development.

Hundred Rabbits Pino onboard Raspberry Pi workstation and barometer

The official Raspberry Pi 7″ touch display, a Raspberry Pi 3B+, a Pimorni Blinkt, and a Poker II Keyboard make up Pino‘s experimental development station.

“The Pi computer is currently used only as an experimental development tool aboard Pino, but could readily be turned into a complete development platform, would our principal computers fail.” they explain, before going into the build process for the Raspberry Pi–powered barometer.

Hundred Rabbits Pino onboard Raspberry Pi workstation and barometer

The use of solderless headers make this weather station an ideal build wherever space and tools are limited.

The barometer uses the sensor power of the Pimoroni Enviro HAT to measure atmospheric pressure, and a Raspberry Pi Zero displays this data on the Scroll pHAT HD. It thus advises the two travellers of oncoming storms. By taking advantage of the solderless header provided by the Sheffield-based pirates, the Hundred Rabbits team was able to put the device together with relative ease. They provide all information for the build here.

Hundred Rabbits Pino onboard Raspberry Pi workstation and barometer

All aboard Pino

If you’d like to follow the journey of Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega as they continue to travel the oceans aboard Pino, you can follow them on YouTube or Twitter, and via their website.

We are Hundred Rabbits

This is us, this what we do, and these are our intentions! We live, and work from our sailboat Pino. Traveling helps us stay creative, and we feed what we see back into our work. We make games, art, books and music under the studio name ‘Hundred Rabbits.’

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Join us at Raspberry Fields 2018!

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-fields-2018/

This summer, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is bringing you an all-new community event taking place in Cambridge, UK!

Raspberry Fields 2018 Raspberry Pi festival

Raspberry Fields

On the weekend of Saturday 30 June and Sunday 1 July 2018, the Pi Towers team, with lots of help from our community of young people, educators, hobbyists, and tech enthusiasts, will be running Raspberry Fields, our brand-new annual festival of digital making!

Raspberry Fields 2018 Raspberry Pi festival

It will be a chance for people of all ages and skill levels to have a go at getting creative with tech, and it will be a celebration of all that our digital makers have already learnt and achieved, whether through taking part in Code Clubs, CoderDojos, or Raspberry Jams, or through trying our resources at home.

Dive into digital making

At Raspberry Fields, you will have the chance to inspire your inner inventor! Learn about amazing projects others in the community are working on, such as cool robots and wearable technology; have a go at a variety of hands-on activities, from home automation projects to remote-controlled vehicles and more; see fascinating science- and technology-related talks and musical performances. After your visit, you’ll be excited to go home and get making!

Raspberry Fields 2018 Raspberry Pi festivalIf you’re wondering about bringing along young children or less technologically minded family members or friends, there’ll be plenty for them to enjoy — with lots of festival-themed activities such as face painting, fun performances, free giveaways, and delicious food, Raspberry Fields will have something for everyone!

Get your tickets

This two-day ticketed event will be taking place at Cambridge Junction, the city’s leading arts centre. Tickets are £5 if you are aged 16 or older, and free for everyone under 16. Get your tickets by clicking the button on the Raspberry Fields web page!

Where: Cambridge Junction, Clifton Way, Cambridge, CB1 7GX, UK
When: Saturday 30 June 2018, 10:30 – 18:00 and Sunday 1 July 2018, 10:00 – 17:30

Get involved

We are currently looking for people who’d like to contribute activities, talks, or performances with digital themes to the festival. This could be something like live music, dance, or other show acts; talks; or drop-in Raspberry Fields 2018 Raspberry Pi festivalmaking activities. In addition, we’re looking for artists who’d like to showcase interactive digital installations, for proud makers who are keen to exhibit their projects, and for vendors who’d like to join in. We particularly encourage young people to showcase projects they’ve created or deliver talks on their digital making journey!Raspberry Fields 2018 Raspberry Pi festival

Your contribution to Raspberry Fields should focus on digital making and be fun and engaging for an audience of various ages. However, it doesn’t need to be specific to Raspberry Pi. You might be keen to demonstrate a project you’ve built, do a short Q&A session on what you’ve learnt, or present something more in-depth in the auditorium; maybe you’re one of our approved resellers wanting to showcase in our market area. We’re also looking for digital makers to run drop-in activity sessions, as well as for people who’d like to be marshals with smiling faces who will ensure that everyone has a wonderful time!

If you’d like to take part in Raspberry Fields, let us know via this form, and we’ll be in touch with you soon.

The post Join us at Raspberry Fields 2018! appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Artificial Intelligence and the Attack/Defense Balance

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/artificial_inte.html

Artificial intelligence technologies have the potential to upend the longstanding advantage that attack has over defense on the Internet. This has to do with the relative strengths and weaknesses of people and computers, how those all interplay in Internet security, and where AI technologies might change things.

You can divide Internet security tasks into two sets: what humans do well and what computers do well. Traditionally, computers excel at speed, scale, and scope. They can launch attacks in milliseconds and infect millions of computers. They can scan computer code to look for particular kinds of vulnerabilities, and data packets to identify particular kinds of attacks.

Humans, conversely, excel at thinking and reasoning. They can look at the data and distinguish a real attack from a false alarm, understand the attack as it’s happening, and respond to it. They can find new sorts of vulnerabilities in systems. Humans are creative and adaptive, and can understand context.

Computers — so far, at least — are bad at what humans do well. They’re not creative or adaptive. They don’t understand context. They can behave irrationally because of those things.

Humans are slow, and get bored at repetitive tasks. They’re terrible at big data analysis. They use cognitive shortcuts, and can only keep a few data points in their head at a time. They can also behave irrationally because of those things.

AI will allow computers to take over Internet security tasks from humans, and then do them faster and at scale. Here are possible AI capabilities:

  • Discovering new vulnerabilities — and, more importantly, new types of vulnerabilities in systems, both by the offense to exploit and by the defense to patch, and then automatically exploiting or patching them.
  • Reacting and adapting to an adversary’s actions, again both on the offense and defense sides. This includes reasoning about those actions and what they mean in the context of the attack and the environment.
  • Abstracting lessons from individual incidents, generalizing them across systems and networks, and applying those lessons to increase attack and defense effectiveness elsewhere.
  • Identifying strategic and tactical trends from large datasets and using those trends to adapt attack and defense tactics.

That’s an incomplete list. I don’t think anyone can predict what AI technologies will be capable of. But it’s not unreasonable to look at what humans do today and imagine a future where AIs are doing the same things, only at computer speeds, scale, and scope.

Both attack and defense will benefit from AI technologies, but I believe that AI has the capability to tip the scales more toward defense. There will be better offensive and defensive AI techniques. But here’s the thing: defense is currently in a worse position than offense precisely because of the human components. Present-day attacks pit the relative advantages of computers and humans against the relative weaknesses of computers and humans. Computers moving into what are traditionally human areas will rebalance that equation.

Roy Amara famously said that we overestimate the short-term effects of new technologies, but underestimate their long-term effects. AI is notoriously hard to predict, so many of the details I speculate about are likely to be wrong — and AI is likely to introduce new asymmetries that we can’t foresee. But AI is the most promising technology I’ve seen for bringing defense up to par with offense. For Internet security, that will change everything.

This essay previously appeared in the March/April 2018 issue of IEEE Security & Privacy.

Needed: Sales Development Representative!

Post Syndicated from Yev original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/needed-sales-development-representative/

At inception, Backblaze was a consumer company. Thousands upon thousands of individuals came to our website and gave us $5/mo to keep their data safe. But, we didn’t sell business solutions. It took us years before we had a sales team. In the last couple of years, we’ve released products that businesses of all sizes love: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and Backblaze for Business Computer Backup. Those businesses want to integrate Backblaze into their infrastructure, so it’s time to expand our sales team and hire our first dedicated outbound Sales Development Representative!

Company Description:
Founded in 2007, Backblaze started with a mission to make backup software elegant and provide complete peace of mind. Over the course of almost a decade, we have become a pioneer in robust, scalable low cost cloud backup. Recently, we launched B2 — robust and reliable object storage at just $0.005/gb/mo. Part of our differentiation is being able to offer the lowest price of any of the big players while still being profitable.

We’ve managed to nurture a team oriented culture with amazingly low turnover. We value our people and their families. Don’t forget to check out our “About Us” page to learn more about the people and some of our perks.

We have built a profitable, high growth business. While we love our investors, we have maintained control over the business. That means our corporate goals are simple — grow sustainably and profitably.

Some Backblaze Perks:

  • Competitive healthcare plans
  • Competitive compensation and 401k
  • All employees receive option grants
  • Unlimited vacation days
  • Strong coffee
  • Fully stocked Micro kitchen
  • Catered breakfast and lunches
  • Awesome people who work on awesome projects
  • New Parent Childcare bonus
  • Normal work hours
  • Get to bring your pets into the office
  • San Mateo Office — located near Caltrain and Highways 101 & 280

As our first Sales Development Representative (SDR), we are looking for someone who is organized, has high-energy and strong interpersonal communication skills. The ideal person will have a passion for sales, love to cold call and figure out new ways to get potential customers. Ideally the SDR will have 1-2 years experience working in a fast paced sales environment. We are looking for someone who knows how to manage their time and has top class communication skills. It’s critical that our SDR is able to learn quickly when using new tools.

Additional Responsibilities Include:

  • Generate qualified leads, set up demos and outbound opportunities by phone and email.
  • Work with our account managers to pass qualified leads and track in salesforce.com.
  • Report internally on prospecting performance and identify potential optimizations.
  • Continuously fine tune outbound messaging – both email and cold calls to drive results.
  • Update and leverage salesforce.com and other sales tools to better track business and drive efficiencies.

  • Bachelor’s degree (B.A.)
  • Minimum of 1-2 years of sales experience.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
  • Proven ability to work in a fast-paced, dynamic and goal-oriented environment.
  • Maintain a high sense of urgency and entrepreneurial work ethic that is required to drive business outcomes, with exceptional attention to detail.
  • Positive“can do” attitude, passionate and able to show commitment.
  • Fearless yet cordial personality- not afraid to make cold calls and introductions yet personable enough to connect with potential Backblaze customers.
  • Articulate and good listening skills.
  • Ability to set and manage multiple priorities.

What’s it like working with the Sales team?

The Backblaze sales team collaborates. We help each other out by sharing ideas, templates, and our customer’s experiences. When we talk about our accomplishments, there is no “I did this,” only “we.” We are truly a team.

We are honest to each other and our customers and communicate openly. We aim to have fun by embracing crazy ideas and creative solutions. We try to think not outside the box, but with no boxes at all. Customers are the driving force behind the success of the company and we care deeply about their success.

If this all sounds like you:

  1. Send an email to jobscontact@backblaze.com with the position in the subject line.
  2. Tell us a bit about your sales experience.
  3. Include your resume.

The post Needed: Sales Development Representative! appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Improve the Operational Efficiency of Amazon Elasticsearch Service Domains with Automated Alarms Using Amazon CloudWatch

Post Syndicated from Veronika Megler original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/improve-the-operational-efficiency-of-amazon-elasticsearch-service-domains-with-automated-alarms-using-amazon-cloudwatch/

A customer has been successfully creating and running multiple Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) domains to support their business users’ search needs across products, orders, support documentation, and a growing suite of similar needs. The service has become heavily used across the organization.  This led to some domains running at 100% capacity during peak times, while others began to run low on storage space. Because of this increased usage, the technical teams were in danger of missing their service level agreements.  They contacted me for help.

This post shows how you can set up automated alarms to warn when domains need attention.

Solution overview

Amazon ES is a fully managed service that delivers Elasticsearch’s easy-to-use APIs and real-time analytics capabilities along with the availability, scalability, and security that production workloads require.  The service offers built-in integrations with a number of other components and AWS services, enabling customers to go from raw data to actionable insights quickly and securely.

One of these other integrated services is Amazon CloudWatch. CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS Cloud resources and the applications that you run on AWS. You can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources.

CloudWatch collects metrics for Amazon ES. You can use these metrics to monitor the state of your Amazon ES domains, and set alarms to notify you about high utilization of system resources.  For more information, see Amazon Elasticsearch Service Metrics and Dimensions.

While the metrics are automatically collected, the missing piece is how to set alarms on these metrics at appropriate levels for each of your domains. This post includes sample Python code to evaluate the current state of your Amazon ES environment, and to set up alarms according to AWS recommendations and best practices.

There are two components to the sample solution:

  • es-check-cwalarms.py: This Python script checks the CloudWatch alarms that have been set, for all Amazon ES domains in a given account and region.
  • es-create-cwalarms.py: This Python script sets up a set of CloudWatch alarms for a single given domain.

The sample code can also be found in the amazon-es-check-cw-alarms GitHub repo. The scripts are easy to extend or combine, as described in the section “Extensions and Adaptations”.

Assessing the current state

The first script, es-check-cwalarms.py, is used to give an overview of the configurations and alarm settings for all the Amazon ES domains in the given region. The script takes the following parameters:

python es-checkcwalarms.py -h
usage: es-checkcwalarms.py [-h] [-e ESPREFIX] [-n NOTIFY] [-f FREE][-p PROFILE] [-r REGION]
Checks a set of recommended CloudWatch alarms for Amazon Elasticsearch Service domains (optionally, those beginning with a given prefix).
optional arguments:
  -h, --help   		show this help message and exit
  -e ESPREFIX, --esprefix ESPREFIX	Only check Amazon Elasticsearch Service domains that begin with this prefix.
  -n NOTIFY, --notify NOTIFY    List of CloudWatch alarm actions; e.g. ['arn:aws:sns:xxxx']
  -f FREE, --free FREE  Minimum free storage (MB) on which to alarm
  -p PROFILE, --profile PROFILE     IAM profile name to use
  -r REGION, --region REGION       AWS region for the domain. Default: us-east-1

The script first identifies all the domains in the given region (or, optionally, limits them to the subset that begins with a given prefix). It then starts running a set of checks against each one.

The script can be run from the command line or set up as a scheduled Lambda function. For example, for one customer, it was deemed appropriate to regularly run the script to check that alarms were correctly set for all domains. In addition, because configuration changes—cluster size increases to accommodate larger workloads being a common change—might require updates to alarms, this approach allowed the automatic identification of alarms no longer appropriately set as the domain configurations changed.

The output shown below is the output for one domain in my account.

Starting checks for Elasticsearch domain iotfleet , version is 53
Iotfleet Automated snapshot hour (UTC): 0
Iotfleet Instance configuration: 1 instances; type:m3.medium.elasticsearch
Iotfleet Instance storage definition is: 4 GB; free storage calced to: 819.2 MB
iotfleet Desired free storage set to (in MB): 819.2
iotfleet WARNING: Not using VPC Endpoint
iotfleet WARNING: Does not have Zone Awareness enabled
iotfleet WARNING: Instance count is ODD. Best practice is for an even number of data nodes and zone awareness.
iotfleet WARNING: Does not have Dedicated Masters.
iotfleet WARNING: Neither index nor search slow logs are enabled.
iotfleet WARNING: EBS not in use. Using instance storage only.
iotfleet Alarm ok; definition matches. Test-Elasticsearch-iotfleet-ClusterStatus.yellow-Alarm ClusterStatus.yellow
iotfleet Alarm ok; definition matches. Test-Elasticsearch-iotfleet-ClusterStatus.red-Alarm ClusterStatus.red
iotfleet Alarm ok; definition matches. Test-Elasticsearch-iotfleet-CPUUtilization-Alarm CPUUtilization
iotfleet Alarm ok; definition matches. Test-Elasticsearch-iotfleet-JVMMemoryPressure-Alarm JVMMemoryPressure
iotfleet WARNING: Missing alarm!! ('ClusterIndexWritesBlocked', 'Maximum', 60, 5, 'GreaterThanOrEqualToThreshold', 1.0)
iotfleet Alarm ok; definition matches. Test-Elasticsearch-iotfleet-AutomatedSnapshotFailure-Alarm AutomatedSnapshotFailure
iotfleet Alarm: Threshold does not match: Test-Elasticsearch-iotfleet-FreeStorageSpace-Alarm Should be:  819.2 ; is 3000.0

The output messages fall into the following categories:

  • System overview, Informational: The Amazon ES version and configuration, including instance type and number, storage, automated snapshot hour, etc.
  • Free storage: A calculation for the appropriate amount of free storage, based on the recommended 20% of total storage.
  • Warnings: best practices that are not being followed for this domain. (For more about this, read on.)
  • Alarms: An assessment of the CloudWatch alarms currently set for this domain, against a recommended set.

The script contains an array of recommended CloudWatch alarms, based on best practices for these metrics and statistics. Using the array allows alarm parameters (such as free space) to be updated within the code based on current domain statistics and configurations.

For a given domain, the script checks if each alarm has been set. If the alarm is set, it checks whether the values match those in the array esAlarms. In the output above, you can see three different situations being reported:

  • Alarm ok; definition matches. The alarm set for the domain matches the settings in the array.
  • Alarm: Threshold does not match. An alarm exists, but the threshold value at which the alarm is triggered does not match.
  • WARNING: Missing alarm!! The recommended alarm is missing.

All in all, the list above shows that this domain does not have a configuration that adheres to best practices, nor does it have all the recommended alarms.

Setting up alarms

Now that you know that the domains in their current state are missing critical alarms, you can correct the situation.

To demonstrate the script, set up a new domain named “ver”, in us-west-2. Specify 1 node, and a 10-GB EBS disk. Also, create an SNS topic in us-west-2 with a name of “sendnotification”, which sends you an email.

Run the second script, es-create-cwalarms.py, from the command line. This script creates (or updates) the desired CloudWatch alarms for the specified Amazon ES domain, “ver”.

python es-create-cwalarms.py -r us-west-2 -e test -c ver -n "['arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:xxxxxxxxxx:sendnotification']"
EBS enabled: True type: gp2 size (GB): 10 No Iops 10240  total storage (MB)
Desired free storage set to (in MB): 2048.0
Creating  Test-Elasticsearch-ver-ClusterStatus.yellow-Alarm
Creating  Test-Elasticsearch-ver-ClusterStatus.red-Alarm
Creating  Test-Elasticsearch-ver-CPUUtilization-Alarm
Creating  Test-Elasticsearch-ver-JVMMemoryPressure-Alarm
Creating  Test-Elasticsearch-ver-FreeStorageSpace-Alarm
Creating  Test-Elasticsearch-ver-ClusterIndexWritesBlocked-Alarm
Creating  Test-Elasticsearch-ver-AutomatedSnapshotFailure-Alarm
Successfully finished creating alarms!

As with the first script, this script contains an array of recommended CloudWatch alarms, based on best practices for these metrics and statistics. This approach allows you to add or modify alarms based on your use case (more on that below).

After running the script, navigate to Alarms on the CloudWatch console. You can see the set of alarms set up on your domain.

Because the “ver” domain has only a single node, cluster status is yellow, and that alarm is in an “ALARM” state. It’s already sent a notification that the alarm has been triggered.

What to do when an alarm triggers

After alarms are set up, you need to identify the correct action to take for each alarm, which depends on the alarm triggered. For ideas, guidance, and additional pointers to supporting documentation, see Get Started with Amazon Elasticsearch Service: Set CloudWatch Alarms on Key Metrics. For information about common errors and recovery actions to take, see Handling AWS Service Errors.

In most cases, the alarm triggers due to an increased workload. The likely action is to reconfigure the system to handle the increased workload, rather than reducing the incoming workload. Reconfiguring any backend store—a category of systems that includes Elasticsearch—is best performed when the system is quiescent or lightly loaded. Reconfigurations such as setting zone awareness or modifying the disk type cause Amazon ES to enter a “processing” state, potentially disrupting client access.

Other changes, such as increasing the number of data nodes, may cause Elasticsearch to begin moving shards, potentially impacting search performance on these shards while this is happening. These actions should be considered in the context of your production usage. For the same reason I also do not recommend running a script that resets all domains to match best practices.

Avoid the need to reconfigure during heavy workload by setting alarms at a level that allows a considered approach to making the needed changes. For example, if you identify that each weekly peak is increasing, you can reconfigure during a weekly quiet period.

While Elasticsearch can be reconfigured without being quiesced, it is not a best practice to automatically scale it up and down based on usage patterns. Unlike some other AWS services, I recommend against setting a CloudWatch action that automatically reconfigures the system when alarms are triggered.

There are other situations where the planned reconfiguration approach may not work, such as low or zero free disk space causing the domain to reject writes. If the business is dependent on the domain continuing to accept incoming writes and deleting data is not an option, the team may choose to reconfigure immediately.

Extensions and adaptations

You may wish to modify the best practices encoded in the scripts for your own environment or workloads. It’s always better to avoid situations where alerts are generated but routinely ignored. All alerts should trigger a review and one or more actions, either immediately or at a planned date. The following is a list of common situations where you may wish to set different alarms for different domains:

  • Dev/test vs. production
    You may have a different set of configuration rules and alarms for your dev environment configurations than for test. For example, you may require zone awareness and dedicated masters for your production environment, but not for your development domains. Or, you may not have any alarms set in dev. For test environments that mirror your potential peak load, test to ensure that the alarms are appropriately triggered.
  • Differing workloads or SLAs for different domains
    You may have one domain with a requirement for superfast search performance, and another domain with a heavy ingest load that tolerates slower search response. Your reaction to slow response for these two workloads is likely to be different, so perhaps the thresholds for these two domains should be set at a different level. In this case, you might add a “max CPU utilization” alarm at 100% for 1 minute for the fast search domain, while the other domain only triggers an alarm when the average has been higher than 60% for 5 minutes. You might also add a “free space” rule with a higher threshold to reflect the need for more space for the heavy ingest load if there is danger that it could fill the available disk quickly.
  • “Normal” alarms versus “emergency” alarms
    If, for example, free disk space drops to 25% of total capacity, an alarm is triggered that indicates action should be taken as soon as possible, such as cleaning up old indexes or reconfiguring at the next quiet period for this domain. However, if free space drops below a critical level (20% free space), action must be taken immediately in order to prevent Amazon ES from setting the domain to read-only. Similarly, if the “ClusterIndexWritesBlocked” alarm triggers, the domain has already stopped accepting writes, so immediate action is needed. In this case, you may wish to set “laddered” alarms, where one threshold causes an alarm to be triggered to review the current workload for a planned reconfiguration, but a different threshold raises a “DefCon 3” alarm that immediate action is required.

The sample scripts provided here are a starting point, intended for you to adapt to your own environment and needs.

Running the scripts one time can identify how far your current state is from your desired state, and create an initial set of alarms. Regularly re-running these scripts can capture changes in your environment over time and adjusting your alarms for changes in your environment and configurations. One customer has set them up to run nightly, and to automatically create and update alarms to match their preferred settings.

Removing unwanted alarms

Each CloudWatch alarm costs approximately $0.10 per month. You can remove unwanted alarms in the CloudWatch console, under Alarms. If you set up a “ver” domain above, remember to remove it to avoid continuing charges.

Setting CloudWatch alarms appropriately for your Amazon ES domains can help you avoid suboptimal performance and allow you to respond to workload growth or configuration issues well before they become urgent. This post gives you a starting point for doing so. The additional sleep you’ll get knowing you don’t need to be concerned about Elasticsearch domain performance will allow you to focus on building creative solutions for your business and solving problems for your customers.

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Analyzing Amazon Elasticsearch Service Slow Logs Using Amazon CloudWatch Logs Streaming and Kibana and Get Started with Amazon Elasticsearch Service: How Many Shards Do I Need?

About the Author

Dr. Veronika Megler is a senior consultant at Amazon Web Services. She works with our customers to implement innovative big data, AI and ML projects, helping them accelerate their time-to-value when using AWS.