The biggest DDoS attack in history?

Microsoft has released some stats on how they're mitigating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. They not only describe how they protected Azure services, but also how many attacks there were. And this blew my mind . . .

For the full story (and some other tasty tidbits of Azure news this week), read on!

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We all know that Internet services experience attacks frequently, and the bigger the service, the bigger the target. I just didn’t know it was this much.

In August 2021, there were on average 1955 attacks per day, that Azure prevented or mitigated — with the highest being 4,296 on August 10. Over 4,000 in a single day!

In the second half of 2021, there were 359,713 attacks in total. Holy Batman! That is an attack now . . . and now . . . and now.

Last October, I told you about a huge DDoS attack of 2.4 terabit per second. That is 300Gb per second of rubbish data being hurled at a service. Since then, three larger attacks have been mitigated in Azure, the biggest being in November and measuring 3.47 Tbps on the DDoS-o-meter.

This is possibly the biggest in DDoS and Internet history, and Azure was able to squash that one too.

While the numbers are impressive (and quite frankly hard to comprehend), I think the main message here is that DDoS attacks are not going away nor getting any smaller. Because they are so easy to mount and cheap to buy (yes, you can buy a DDoS-as-a-service), we’ll only see more and bigger. However, taking advantage of cloud platforms like Azure means you will most likely never have to worry about it. That is one of the reasons I love cloud.

Get all the details here.

Have you heard of Azure Open Source Day? This predominantly Linux event is all-online and free to attend on February 15. Microsoft has put together a list of 7 reasons why you should attend. Check it out!

This is another favorite story from the past week, mainly because the headline had "quantum" and "space" in it. (I make no excuses.)

"NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has turned to Azure Quantum to explore ways to communicate more efficiently with spacecraft exploring our solar system and beyond," Microsoft said in a blog post. 

JPL are using quantum-inspired optimization algorithms on Azure to increase the fidelity they can use for missions such as the Mars rover and the James Webb space telescope. The quantum service on Azure is complementing the JPL Deep Space Network, a network of large radio telescopes in California, Spain and Australia.

In this specific example, Microsoft is describing how they reduced the time needed for a scheduling optimization from 2 hours to 16 minutes.

When you're dealing with messages going to Mars, optimizing the process time for each update or schedule to the rover, telescope, or whatever you are controlling, an almost 10-fold decrease in time is huge.

For those who still doubt the value of space exploration and technology, remember that scheduling problems aren’t unique to NASA and space. These problems exist in most industries, and they will benefit from this advance too. Love it.

Azure Arc lets you include your on-premises and "other-cloud" VMs, SQL servers and Kubernetes cluster in Azure. With Arc you can control them and monitor them, as if they were on Azure. It is one of the key tools on Azure to facilitate an efficient hybrid infrastructure.

Azure landing zones are the output of a multi-subscription Azure environment that accounts for scale, security governance, networking, and identity. In other words, it is a recommended approach to get the best out of Azure in a secure and scalable way. Putting this together with the Cloud Adoption Framework, you get a Landing Zone accelerator, which can now take Arc into account.

As Microsoft puts it “The landing zone accelerator provides best practices, guidance, and automated reference implementations so that customers can get started with their deployments quickly and easily.”

The "quickly" and "easily" parts should be taken with a grain of salt, as hybrid environments are not always straight forward. At least the Landing Zone accelerator will provide an initial approach and way forward.

For more info, go here.

If you're looking to make 2022 the year you begin your cloud career or begin picking up the sweet skills needed to land some of the top-paying jobs in tech, then check out ACG’s free plan. It gives you access to free courses and quizzes, plus learning paths and original series content.

The entire month of February the full course Introduction to the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure is free — as well as a bunch of other content. And you don’t need a credit card to sign up. Get started here!

Well, that's all for this week. Until next time, I’ll see you in the cloud. Keep being awesome, cloud gurus!

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