New this week: AWS Price Information, MFA, Enhanced Data Encryption, Backup Retention, Recovering from Mistakes

By 
Frank Stienhans
Ocean9 Solution

Hot from the kitchen

By 
Frank Stienhans
, posted on
, posted 
July 14, 2016

What’s a Rich Text element?

The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.

asdsadsadn sldjflsdjf

Static and dynamic content editing

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

New this week

Following the demand from our customers and partners, we release new capabilities frequently. Today it is:

  • AWS Price Information
  • Multi-Factor Authentication
  • Enhanced Data Encryption
  • Backup Retention
  • A grace period for mistakes

AWS Type and Price Information

All sizing and pricing starts with, well size and price information. Unfortunately my little pet project from 2013 @ AWS was taken down. A partner has tracked me down. Here it is for you and everyone. Please note, that the information has a maximum age of 1 hour compared to published information by AWS. It does not cover the China regions. 

Public HTML Endpoint

https://us-west-2.beta.ocean9.io/info

An example search for EC2 Instance Prices could be:

region:eu-central-1 r3.8xlarge,x1.32xlarge sles,rhel term:0

Public JSON Endpoint 

All fields are query able:  

  • Instance Types: https://us-west-2.beta.ocean9.io/info/ec2/instance_types
  • Instance Prices: https://us-west-2.beta.ocean9.io/info/ec2/instance_prices?$limit=50&$sort=updated&os=sles&region=us-west-2
  • Storage Prices:  https://us-west-2.beta.ocean9.io/info/ec2/storage_prices?$limit=50&region=us-west-2

Multi-Factor Authentication

Both for our Management Console as well as our Command Line Interface we offer now Multi-Factor Authentication.

All someone has to do is to set the Phone Number in the User Details screen.

As alternative, in the Ocean9 command line it will be for instance:

> core/user/i.do.not.exist@ocean9.io put phone:+16501234567

Enhanced Data Encryption

All HANA Data, whether at rest or in motion are and were encrypted using Ocean9 on AWS. For the EBS backed SAP specific volumes of a HANA System, Ocean9 leveraged the account specific default 'aws/ebs' AWS KMS Encryption Key. A partner has requested us to take this one step further. Starting today, when you create a new HANA Environment, we will automatically generate an environment specific Encryption Key in AWS KMS. All HANA Systems that you provision into that environment will use this key for encryption of:

  • HANA Data
  • HANA Log
  • HANA Shared
  • usr / sap
  • HANA Backup

Your extra effort is none. Your performance impact is none. Your extra cost is $ 1 / month / Environment for AWS KMS.

HANA Backup Retention

With a durability of 99.999999999%, it is the best practice to store SAP HANA Data and Log Backups in Amazon S3. It is very likely that your AWS Bill will show the HANA Backups as a minor fraction compared to Amazon EC2. Nevertheless, at least for Dev & Test environments you might want to stay organized. The amazing feature of Amazon S3 Lifecycle Definitions work on a per object basis. This makes it of limited value for the question of HANA Backup Retention, as your HANA Data Backups will be older than the HANA Log Backups and therefore will lead to inconsistent backups over time.

That is why we are introducing a simple way to specify the Backup Retention. In Ocean9, just navigate to an existing HANA Environment and type in a value in the new Backup Retention field.

Or in the Ocean9 Command Line (example sets a 30 day backup retention period):

> hana/env/env-1-234 put backup_retention:30

All backups that were and are taken from HANA systems in that environment will now follow that retention time. The eventual backup deletion will be executed as asynchronous operations, that you can see and analyze in the operations log.

I am sometimes asking myself what is more important in the cloud, a HANA System or a HANA Backup when you have end to end provisioning + recovery times for your largest HANA Systems of less than 2 hours?

Whatever the answer is, the cloud makes backups even more important. As a result, you might want to protect this new setting with an Ocean9 User Policy record and attach it to everyone but you (or even to yourself).

Example Ocean9 User Policy record: 

DENY hana/env/env-1-234 PUT

A grace period for mistakes

Now, we all experienced this: Human error, realizing the mistake often a few seconds later.

In 1995, fresh from school, I still remember how I tried out this exciting thing: Assembler. A few seconds later, all data on the 40 MB hard-drive was gone.

Ocean9 gives you now a grace period of a few seconds for important operations that were triggered.

All operations can be suspended, aborted or resumed at any point in time. You can also resume aborted operations. The difference between suspend and abort is that abort unlocks the underlying resource (a HANA Backup in the example) for further operations waiting in the queue. In other words you should either resume or abort a suspended operation at some point.

In the Ocean9 Command Line

core/track/track-4xt-1 resume | stop | fail

Summary

I hope this weeks update had something interesting for you. If you have questions or would like to request an additional capability please contact us: questions@ocean9.io .

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