It made for a funny headline from some sites to report that online dating site, Whatsyourprice.com, “dumped” Amazon after its outage late last month/last week. But other sites dependent on Amazon’s EC2 service planned better. So, question is: Is it reasonable to expect no outages?

InformationWeek reports:

“Build it and they will come. Build it right, and they will stay.” That’s the slogan of Okta, an identity management service built on top of Amazon Web Services’ EC2 cloud. Part of EC2 went down during a power outage that affected its Ashburn, Va., data center June 29. But Okta built its Amazon-based service across more than one availability zone, and it didn’t experience any downtime.

In the aftermath of the outage, Whatsyourprice.com, an online dating service, also pondered those words. It had tried to build its application right, using two availability zones as Amazon advised, and it still faced an onslaught of customer complaints in the midst of the outage. “We received nearly a thousand complaints,” a level of disruption that Whatsyourprice.com had never seen before, said CEO Brandon Wade in an interview.

Instagram, Quora, Heroku, Pinterest, Hootsuite, and Netflix were also affected — and users complained — but they sites did not walk away from Amazon.

Will others — namely, you — follow Whatsyourprice.com and walk? Or is pilot error (when natural disaster strikes) par for the course and something you are willing to work around? Will Google’s — or any others’ — cloud be any better? How about on-premises. Would it not be more expensive to own your own redundant locations than buy time from Amazon?

What does a software developer need to provision a cloud server? In most cases nothing more than an Internet connection, an email address for authentication purposes and, depending on the cloud service provider (CSP), a credit card. You might be thinking “surely Andrew, if the developer is provisioning a cloud server for business use there are additional checks and balances to prevent it?”

Unfortunately, this is not the case. The CSP rarely, if ever, takes steps to differentiate between prospective (and paying) customers using its cloud for authorized business use and hobbyists looking to provision their own cloud server for a personal project. Many times the line blurs beyond recognition.

Such is one of the current technology problems that organizations find themselves faced with. Historically, organizations could limit the technological resources, such as servers and applications, utilized by its development and test teams — as they had control of the servers, workstations and the orchestration over its connective tissue (i.e. the network). Read the rest of this entry →

Collecting and analyzing broad categories of customer and product data is becoming equally — if not more — valuable than the product itself, writes Ken Oestreich of The Fountainhead Blog.

In his post over at GigaOm, Oestreich writes Thursday:

And, if the data is becoming so valuable, then analyzing and mining it ought to provide incremental revenue streams beyond the traditional product-based business model. But consider going one step further: If treated right, access to enough quality data would be valuable to others outside of your enterprise too — assuming the correct federation and business models were constructed.

This accretion of value around large data sets — particularly alongside an external ecosystem — is analogous to what we’re familiar with in the product world: The Platform. Indeed, we may find that entirely new business models based on data platforms may arise from legacy product companies.

The net-net is that amassing and exposing vast amounts of unique data to third-party ecosystem partners can effectively create Data-as-a-Platform.

Cloudline recently raised the question of whether one possible “trickle-down” effect of the cloud raised by an author — delivering Big Data for all — was really something that small businesses could look forward to.

Oestreich writes that “the coming age of big data isn’t just about storing and analyzing lots of bits. It’s about extending the core business models to leverage IP stored-up in your data, and creating new partner ecosystems — and data supply chains — to create even more value for your enterprise. That’s just where the fun starts.”

Have your say: With Data-as-a-Platform, could the Big Data-ready cloud spawn whole new business opportunities for small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs)?

Google signaled its intent [to go big on the public cloud/come after Amazon] when it removed the “beta test” tag last fall from Google App Engine and launched Google Cloud Storage, a separate service dedicated to housing large amounts of data, writes Wired Enterprise’s Cade Metz. But all the pieces fell into place at I/O last week when the company uncloaked Google Compute Engine, a service that gives developers access to hundreds of thousands of raw virtual machines at a moment’s notice.

“Google Compute Engine gives you Linux virtual machines at Google-scale. You can spin up two VMs or 10,000 VMs,” said Urs Hölzle, the man who oversees Google’s vast infrastructure. “You benefit from the efficiency of Google’s data centers and our decade of experience running them.”

Peter Magnusson, the director of engineering for Compute Engine’s sister service, Google App Engine, told Metz that over the last 18 months he couldn’t quite explain how serious the company was about competing with Amazon’s massively popular Elastic Compute Cloud and other commercial services that seek to reinvent the way online applications are built and operated. But now he can:

“We’re pairing Compute Engine with App Engine,” says Peter Magnusson. “But, increasingly, they will be able to work together.”

What this means is that developers and businesses can grab a vast amount of processing power and apply it to almost any task they want. Google is not only offering App Engine — a service that lets you build applications without having to worry about raw storage and processing power — it’s also giving you, well, raw storage and processing power. In other words, it’s going head-to-head with Amazon, the undisputed king of commercial cloud services that has long offered such raw resources as well as “higher level” services for building and running massive applications.

Google pioneered the art of the “cloud” infrastructure, writes Metz in his in-depth report, “Google Shaman Explains Mysteries of ‘Compute Engine’”. But Amazon beat it to the idea of sharing such an infrastructure with the rest of the world. Six years after Amazon first offered its web services to outside developers and businesses, Google is still playing catch-up. But it’s intent on making up that lost ground.

Read the full report and have your say: Is Google’s one-uppance with Compute Engine going to propel it ahead of Amazon? Or will Amazon benefit from being a known-quantity and on a roll of its own, with folks building around its API etc?

Those of us who worry about the government creeping into all our lives can now stop fussing and fighting, cry it all out, and move on to implementing the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

But first, we need two core competencies: the ability to integrate health information across providers AND (soon thereafter) the ability to separate signal from noise.

Both of these competencies will require a propagation of the cloud. Let me explain why. Read the rest of this entry →

I recently spoke with a couple VPs that head up the cloud initiatives at Dell. I have been watching Dell closely, because I think they have one of the best platforms and bundle of products and services in which to launch a full-scale cloud solution. But I have to wonder if it will pan out for them. I recently spoke with a lot of solution providers that did not have some good things to say about Dell.

So I am anxious though to see if they will work with solution providers and give them a profit margin that will make working with Dell a viable solution. Dell is being pretty smart about their cloud offering, and as with many of their products, they are approaching it methodically until they have it just right. There are four main attributes that they are focusing on in the development of their cloud solution. Read the rest of this entry →

While folks like to talk about Google’s many failed properties, one that stands out for Apple is MobileMe. Well, Apple’s troubled child is no more as of Monday — Apple’s new golden boy, iCloud, is all things cloud at Apple now, and includes many of MobileMe’s features.

Gadget Lab’s Christina Bonnington writes of MobileMe’s checkered past:

MobileMe has been one of Apple’s least successful product endeavors. The 2008 launch of the service was marked by numerous bugs, as well as an e-mail blackout for thousands of subscribers. The release went so poorly, in fact, that critics started calling it “MobileMess.” Perhaps the worst criticism came from former CEO Steve Jobs himself. According to Fortune, Jobs reportedly gathered the MobileMe team together shortly after the product launch, asking “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” When he got a reply, he said, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”

Ouch. But the transition to iCloud — including the 20GB free teaser to get them over earlier rather than later — has also not been without bumps in the road:

The transition from MobileMe to iCloud has also been rough for many users. iCloud, whose purpose is largely to unify and sync storage across iOS and Mac devices, is actually the fourth incarnation of web-based storage clients for Apple. In 2000, iTools was a free option for Mac users, which was replaced by subscription-only .Mac in mid 2002. .Mac gave way to MobileMe in 2008, which has since been replaced by iCloud.

At WWDC 2012 — remember that? — Apple laid out some more details on Monday at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference of how Apple’s iCloud will integrate with its next desktop OS, OS X Mountain lion, as well as the iPhone and iPad.

Will iCloud deliver cloud nirvana for Apple customers, and make them forget the troubled past? With Google going big on cloud on the back- and front-ends at I/O and before that with Google Drive, is 2012 shaping up to be the year the cloud defined computing?

By Jon Walsh

Several weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a Cloud Computing Redbooks Residency at IBM in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the office with the longest corridors I have ever seen. IBMers in Raleigh must be the fittest on the planet because it is a mile walk for a coffee.As part of the experience we were invited to contribute to the IBM cloud blog, Thoughts on Cloud. My interest in cloud has been forming over the past three years.  I am not technical but I have an interest in cloud as a concept and I have long thought that infrastructure for the enterprise is too complex and could be simplified, from a delivery perspective, to help realize benefits much more quickly.

When I discuss cloud with clients, certain questions arise. One of the main questions is; why would a large organization with a fully functioning IT infrastructure, that delivers services, and enables that business to compete in its chosen sector choose to introduce a disruptive technology like cloud? Read the rest of this entry →

Can Amazon handle its fast-growing cloud? That the questionWired Enterprise‘s Robert McMillan asked Saturday.

Hurricane-like storms knocked an Amazon data center in Ashburn, Virginia, offline last night, and a chunk of the internet felt it. The six-hour incident temporarily cut off a number of popular internet services, including Netflix, Pinterest, Heroku, and Instagram.

The outage was the second for this particular Amazon data center in the past month. It’s bad news for a cloud computing platform that’s sold as a more reliable alternative to traditional data centers.

In theory, big outages like this aren’t supposed to happen. Amazon is supposed to keep the data centers up and running — something it has become very good at — and customers like Netflix, freed from that drudgery, are supposed to be free to cook up compelling new web application like video streaming.

In reality, though, Amazon data centers have outages all the time. In fact, Amazon tells its customers to plan for this to happen, and to be ready to roll over to a new data center whenever there’s an outage.

That’s what was supposed to happen at Netflix Friday night. But it didn’t work out that way. According toTwitter messages from Netflix Director of Cloud Architecture Adrian Cockcroft and Instagram Engineer Rick Branson, it looks like an Amazon Elastic Load Balancing service, designed to spread Netflix’s processing loads across data centers, failed during the outage. Without that ELB service working properly, the Netflix and Pinterest services hosted by Amazon crashed.

…

So on Saturday, there are two big questions that need to be answered. First, why did Amazon’s Ashburn data center fail? A storm shouldn’t have taken out Amazon’s backup generators. Second, Why were companies like Netflix so drastically affected by a single data center outage?

Read Wired Enterprise‘s full report here.

Cloudline has been emailed by a number of vendors and experts on Monday wanting to weigh in. Guys, please share what you have to say on the matter below in comments, an open forum for discussion.

 

It ought not surprise anyone that Google has entered the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) business. GigaOm’s Derrick Harris broke news of the plans in mid-May, but among knowledgeable cloud circles, it was a foregone conclusion that the search giant would enter into rentable infrastructure.

It was a natural move for Google to join the fray. HP entered the cloud game in April. Microsoft hit CTRL+ALT+DEL on its Platform as a Service (PaaS) in early June and brought it back as an IaaS. Google couldn’t afford to sit idle and hand over the future of an eleventy billion dollar industry to an online book store.

And Google needs new things to talk about. New tablets, new glasses, new media players, etc. “New” is the gas that keeps Google going, what gives it that sheen of innovation that makes it seem like more than an advertising company. More product launches mean more bonuses too, so it’s critical to keep putting products out the door. That’s the incentive plan that brought us Google Wave, Google Buzz, Google Answers and GoogleFlooFlaFlippidittyFloop.

But beyond something new and shiny for the tech press to cover, the move has left many scratching their heads. Read the rest of this entry →