Brad Dickinson | AWS Cost Explorer Update – Better Filtering & Grouping, Report Management, RI Reports

The content below is taken from the original ( World’s largest ARM supercomputer is headed to a nuclear security lab), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Most supercomputers are focused on pure processing speed. Take the DOE's new Summit system, which is now the world's most powerful supercomputer, with 9,000 22-core IBM Power9 processors and over 27,000 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. But processing performa…

The content below is taken from the original ( Partner Interconnect now generally available), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

By Sankari Venkataraman, Technical Program Manager

We are happy to announce that Partner Interconnect, launched in beta in April, is now generally available. Partner Interconnect lets you connect your on-premises resources to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) from the partner location of your choice, at a data rate that meets your needs.

With general availability, you can now receive an SLA for Partner Interconnect connections if you use one of the recommended topologies. If you were a beta user with one of those topologies, you will automatically be covered by the SLA. Charges for the service start with GA (see pricing).

Partner Interconnect is ideal if you want physical connectivity to your GCP resources but cannot connect at one of Google’s peering locations, or if you want to connect with an existing service provider. If you need help understanding the connection options, the information here can help.

In this blog we will walk through how you can start using Partner Interconnect, from choosing a partner that works best for you all the way through how you can deploy and start using your interconnect.

Choosing a partner

If you already have a service provider partner for network connectivity, you can check the list of supported service providers to see if they offer Partner Interconnect service. If not, you can select a partner from the list based on your data center location.

Some critical factors to consider are:

Make sure the partner can offer the availability and latency you need between your on-premises network and their network.
Check whether the partner offers Layer 2 connectivity, Layer 3 connectivity, or both. If you choose a Layer 2 Partner, you have to configure and establish a BGP session between your Cloud Routers and on-premises routers for each VLAN attachment that you create. If you choose a Layer 3 partner, they will take care of the BGP configuration.
Please review the recommended topologies for production-level and non-critical applications. Google provides a 99.99% (with Global Routing) or 99.9% availability SLA, and that only applies to the connectivity between your VPC network and the partner’s network.

Bandwidth options and pricing

Partner Interconnect provides flexible options for bandwidth between 50 Mbps and 10 Gbps. Google charges on a monthly basis for VLAN attachments depending on capacity and egress traffic (see options and pricing).

Setting up Partner Interconnect VLAN attachments

Once you’ve established network connectivity with a partner, and they have set up interconnects with Google, you can set up and activate VLAN attachments using these steps:

Create VLAN attachments.
Request provisioning from the partner.
If you have a Layer 2 partner, complete the BGP configuration and then activate the attachments for traffic to start. If you have a Layer 3 partner, simply activate the attachments, or use the pre-activation option.

With Partner Interconnect, you can connect to GCP where and how you want to. Follow these steps to easily access your GCP compute resources from your on-premises network.

Related content

The content below is taken from the original ( Google may be working on a way to run Windows 10 on a Pixel), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Google's Pixelbook is a high-end laptop that runs Chrome OS. If you're looking to do more with the hardware, like run Windows apps, you may soon be in luck. According to a report at XDA Developers (and picked up by 9to5Google), Google may in fact be…

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

By Andrew Cunningham and Kimber Streams

This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read the full article h…

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

We'll pay you $1.47 to post on social media about our products, $2.05 to mention it in any group chats you're in, and 11 cents per passenger each time you drive your office carpool past one of our billboards.

The content below is taken from the original ( Microsoft’s Office UI update includes a simpler, cleaner ribbon), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Microsoft has given its infamous Office ribbon a much simpler, much less cluttered look as part of its interface redesign for Office.com and Office 365 applications. The tech giant has updated the element to only show the most basic options — if you…

The content below is taken from the original (AWS Cost Explorer Update – Better Filtering & Grouping, Report Management, RI Reports), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Our customers use Cost Explorer to better understand and manage their AWS spending, making heavy use of the reporting, analytics, and visualization tools that it provides. We launched Cost Explorer in 2014 with a focus on simplicity – single click signup, preconfigured default views, and a clean user interface (take a look back at The New AWS Cost Explorer to see where we started). The Cost Explorer has been very popular and we’ve received a lot of great feedback from our customers.

Last week we launched a major upgrade to Cost Explorer. We’ve redesigned the user interface to optimize many common workflows including filtering, report management, selection of date ranges, and grouping of data. We have also included some default reports to make it easier for you to explore the costs related to your use of Reserved Instances.

Looking at Cost Explorer
Since pictures are reportedly worth 1000 words, let’s take a closer look! Cost Explorer is part of the Billing Dashboard so I can start there:

Here’s the Billing Dashboard. I click on Cost Explorer to move ahead:

I can open up Cost Explorer or access one of three preconfigured views. I’ll go for the first option:

The default report shows my EC2 costs and usage (running hours) for the past 3 months:

I can use the Group By menu to break the costs down by EC2 instance type:

I have many other grouping options:

The filtering options are now easier to access and to edit. Here’s the full set:

I can explore my EC2 costs in any set of desired regions:

I can filter and then group by instance type to see how my spending breaks down:

I can click on Download CSV and then process the data locally:

I can also exclude certain instance types from the report. Here’s how I exclude my m4.xlarge, t2.micro, and t2.nano usage:

Report Management
Cost Explorer allows me to customize my existing reports and to create new reports from scratch. I can click on Save As to save my customized report with a new name:

I can see and manage all of my reports on the Saved Reports page (The padlock denotes a default report that cannot be edited and then overwritten):

When I click on New report I can start from a template:

After I click on Create Report, I set up my date range and filters as desired, and click on Save As. I created a report that displays my year-to-date usage of several AWS database services (Amazon Redshift, DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and AWS Database Migration Service):

All of my reports are accessible from the Reports menu so I can check on my costs with a click:

We also simplified the process of selecting a range of dates for a report, including options to select common date ranges:

Reserved Instance Reports
Cost Explorer also includes a pair of reports that will help you to understand and optimize your usage of Reserved Instances. I don’t own an RI’s so I used screen shots supplied by the team.

The RI Utilization report allows you to see how much of your purchased RI capacity is being put to use (the dashed red line represents a utilization target that you can specify):

The RI Coverage report tells you how much of your EC2 usage is being handled by Reserved Instances (this time, the dashed red line represents the desired amount of coverage):

I hope you have enjoyed this tour of the updated Cost Explorer. It is available now and you can start using it today!

— Jeff;

World’s largest ARM supercomputer is headed to a nuclear security lab