In my last post, we started down the path of reviewing parts of the discussion I had with FullArmor's CTO Danny Kim. Throughout that post Danny was talking about FullArmor's background and how their Azure based solutions: AppPortal and PolicyPortal came into existence. In this post, we continue to dive further into the really great background story that Danny was telling and learn about how FullArmor's solutions are actually be put to use to solve some very real problems in an emerging market.
在第一篇文章中，我们停止了丹尼曾提到关于与埃塞俄比亚政府合作，刚过了讨论。当然，我的好奇心被见顶。在这里，我们有FullArmor，美国基于技术公司，在最后确定这是建立在微软的“大出血”边缘基于云服务平台Azure的两款新产品的代码库的过程。而且，在光谱的完全相反的一侧是埃塞俄比亚，这是一个新兴市场的政府。大约从点A到Z.点我跟丹尼要求解释。
“嗯,我们的典型客户是大型组织nizations of the world such as: Wal-Mart, Boeing, Bank of America, CIA, and FBI. What happened was... and again timing and luck... and there is a saying that luck favors the prepared and guess we were prepared. It so happens that a systems integrator... Actually, going back 2 or 3 years ago, there was this Ethiopian gentleman that had this passion to help his country upgrade their education systems so that they could fight poverty, illiteracy, and so on. He got together with a local systems integrator in Seattle which was called SQL Soft. Together they pushed forward a project that got funded to provide a laptop to every teacher so that they could stay connect, receive curriculum, so that they could get tracked.
不幸的是，问题是，你怎么了......有25万名教师以上埃塞俄比亚。政府的问题是，“我们如何来管理这些家伙？”毕竟，这是与轮流停电和参差不齐的互联网服务的新兴市场。其实，我有一个图片，我做展示演示，是他们的数据中心的时候。从字面上看，我有一个更强大的套机在我家，然后他们做他们的政府办公室。所以他们喜欢，“这将需要5到10年的时间打造出一个数据中心”。而且，即使这样仍然有许多基础设施问题，需要加以解决“。
技术是一个伟大的均衡器，当谈到教育。然而，并不总是似乎是技术相关的社会项目始终得到缺少基础设施的挑战。这几乎是鸡蛋发行前的鸡。怎么办部署技术，给那些真正需要它的时候，他们没有非常手段来使用它。换句话说，可悲的事实是，我们继续工程技术，有一个非常困难时期，在“现实世界”的运营。所以对我来说，听到一个非常尖端的解决方案被带入最糟糕的工作环境之一，并成功（后来我们得知），带来微笑着向我的脸。
"Well we already have a relationship with SQL Soft from past training and Group Policy work. So, the SQL Soft guys approached us and said, "We know you guys do stuff around end-point management." Well they didn't know about the stuff were doing on Azure at the time. So their next question was, "Do you guys do anything around this to solve these types of problems?" My first reaction was, "Actually we do! We just ported this application to the new Azure environment and it is very scalable." They said, "That is great, can you put a pilot together and help us present the solution the Ethiopian government".
所以，我们一个月后做的端口，从字面上看后，当我安排一个航班去那里。我们做了一个小试验表明，该解决方案的工作，我们可以管理机器上远程，我们的云服务在云中运行，并通过与Sliverlight的UI浏览器访问。然后，我们证明了内阁成员和他们签署了第二天“。
Wow... Talk about timing! After all, at that point in time, FullArmor's applications were one of the only Azure based solutions in the market and one of its first deployments is in Ethiopia! Obviously, my next question was how FullArmor was able to work around the "real" bandwidth issues that exist in that country. After all, Ethiopia is the 15th most populous country in the world (~85 million people). However, their infrastructure rating is still very low when compared to other nations. For example, in 2007 they only had an average of ~300K Internet users which is one of the lowest per-capita magnitude in the world.
So, when you throw in the fact that PolicyPortal is an end-point management tool. Plus, AppPortal is used to distribute App-V applications. And, the Ethiopian government wanted to also use the solution to distribute information to the teachers. It would seem that the lack of bandwidth would cause the whole solution to be a failure. Luckily Danny explained why this was not the case.
"That was our biggest challenge and how we solved it has been generating a lot interest as well. Actually, anti-virus is another part of our solution. Most of the machines in Ethiopia have an average of 4 to 5 viruses on them. However, a lot of those machines also have anti-virus software installed. The problem is, because the bandwidth is poor and latency is so high. Once you install the anti-virus software that is the only time the signature file is up-to-date. We found that almost every anti-virus product signature file updates were breaking because of the shoddy bandwidth. So, we have a couple of anti-virus vendors that we have integrated with where we replace the signature file delivery mechanism with our agent. Our agent technology was designed to work in and accommodate these harsh environments.
For example in Ethiopia, I saw latency times of up to 6 seconds. Most products break because they timeout. So our agent accommodates for that. We understand that this may take awhile so we keep the sockets open and we make sure that the agent is online and active to handle high latencies found in these environments. Additionally, we also optimize packet size. For example, if the connection is high latency - high bandwidth or low bandwidth -low latency we determine the best packet size for that connection.
它有点像可能发现的差异with some VOIP vendors and the quality the voice over different connections. This is what our agent does, and we were able to show that it actually works. We can download megabytes or even hundreds of megabytes... like the signature files... the initial download is 400MB for some of the anti-virus vendors. We can also send the App-V packages which can be anywhere from 20MB to 200MB. It would just take longer, but our agent stays in there and gets it downloaded."
现在...什么是关于所有这些有趣的是，我们正在谈论的代理是基于FullArmor以前的软件工作。不是，他们刚刚研制对付埃塞俄比亚的挑战。我提这事丹尼，并指出如何将所有的牌真的掉进处了。他笑了，并再次指出：“运气只光顾有准备的......”
那么到底，那是关于一个基于云计算的解决方案如何来在新兴市场部署到帮助解决社会问题的故事。
If you like this, check out some other posts from Tyson:
- 当一台计算机科学学位的问题，而当它不
- Since when did cloud computing become/need a manifesto?
- 为什么一个钓鱼用诱饵证书颁发机构（CA）？
- Would I trust you, if everyone else trusted you?
- 这里是一个很好的问题：是脚本编程或者只是系统管理？
- PowerShell的男孩和失踪的cmdlet的情况下！
- 有趣的使用PowerShell 2.0三项赛！
- Creating a custom 404 page to handle link redirection for ASP.NET web applications
或者，如果你愿意，你还可以检查出一些泰森的最新出版物：
- Windows PowerShell中偷跑（2ND版）
- Windows Server 2008的偷跑（是的，我确实帮助这本书）
Lastly, visit the微软Subnet更多新闻，博客，以及来自各地的网络舆论。或者，报名参加双周微软通讯。（点击新闻/微软新闻快讯）