Amazon EC2
GSA Eases Cloud Computing Procurement
Last week I had the pleasure to co-chair a cloud computing and virtualization event in Washington DC for federal IT professionals. As part of former federal CIO Vivek Kundra's plan, federal agencies have adopted a "cloud-first" policy toward all IT projects. Read more
Where is Amazon's public apology?
Let me apologize in advance if I have somehow overlooked it, but here we are five days after the start of Amazon's calamitous EC2 collapse and the company has yet to issue a public apology.
This is Public Relations 101, no? So what's the holdup? (I'm going to guess lawyers, but that's strictly a guess.) Read more
Amazon's painful slog to fully fix EC2 now in Day 3
While the number of Amazon customer sites still offline or suffering performance degradation may be unknown, there can be no doubting the level of frustration being felt as the company's efforts to fully restore its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service stretch into a third day. Read more
Why Amazon went down in Amazon's own words
The Eastern datacenter remains the problem. Amazon is reporting that its California data center is operating normally. For those trying to understand what went wrong and what Amazon is doing to fix it, Amazon offered these explanations for its customers on its Amazon Web Services Health Dashboard.
Status of Amazon CloudWatch (N. Virginia) is "delayed CloudWatch metrics": Read more
Amazon EC2 debacle drags on into Day 2
Despite restoring service for many customers, Amazon's troubles with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service continue this morning, meaning that debate over the wisdom of relying on such cloud services is certain to grow louder. Read more
Updated: Amazon says it's getting a handle on EC2 outage
Amazon reports this morning that it is making progress in restoring full service to customers of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service in the eastern portion of the country after a rocky stretch of trouble that began sometime before midnight.
Red Hat acquires Makara to boost its cloud
In its first acquisition in two years, Red Hat today announced it was buying cloud app management provider Makara for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition boosts Red Hat's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) as it builds support for its cloud app portability standard, DeltaCloud. Read more
Microsoft's cloud is slower than Google's, Amazon's, benchmark says
Over the past month, Google's cloud, App Engine, performed faster than all of the other major clouds, including Microsoft's Azure. Azure was also consistently slower than at least one of Amazon's EC2 data centers, according to a live benchmarking service known as CloudSleuth.com. Read more
Cloud storage will fail without WAN Acceleration, so FedEx to the rescue?
One cloud provider offers his view of the competitive infrastructure sky
Sinclair Schuller, CEO of software-as-as-service cloud platform Apprenda, recently offered me a view of the infrastructure sky as he sees it. His customers are primarily independent software vendors looking to convert their wares to a SaaS offering. I found his viewpoint to be interesting in helping enterprises navigate though the confusing cloud-filled sky. Read more
3 Most Important Announcements about Microsoft's Azure Cloud
Microsoft's Ray Ozzie significantly blew past the basic Exchange, SharePoint and SQL database hosting services with the Azure announcements at PDC 2009 yesterday. Read more
Microsoft retrofits its cloud so apps can live on servers and Azure
One week after Microsoft's Steven Elop took Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff to task claiming the cloud is not reliable, Microsoft officially launched the almost-final version of its own cloud, Windows Azure. It has newly outfitted its cloud so that an app can live both on Azure and on a local server. Microsoft today announced new management features to Windows Azure that support such dual-location apps. Read more
If The Cloud Were Really The Cloud Then Outages Would Be Rare
Do we really have a cloud or just offsite Microsoft, Cisco and Linux hosting centers? I'm struck by what seems like a near constant barrage of news about cloud outages and service downtime. Read more
Will The Cloud Manage To Persist? Lessons From Operating In The Cloud
Submitted by Mitchell Ashley on Thu, 06/04/09 - 1:31pm.It's been an interesting learning experience using Amazon's EC2 computing cloud. I was showing a friend who I frequently seek technical council how EC2 resources are managed using the ElasticFox and S3 Organizer FireFox plugins. He was quite shocked at the granular, low level you're dealing with in bringing up instances from saved images (AMIs), attaching volumes, local steps that need to be performed (such as when attaching dynamic volumes), and requirements to bundle images to persist data on any local drives. Read more
Ozzie, Services and Virtualization Will Get The Cloud Started Too
Submitted by Mitchell Ashley on Fri, 05/22/09 - 11:07am.In an interview Ray Ozzie indicated that email and collaboration, a.k.a. Exchange, SharePoint and online Outlook, is what enterprises will turn to first as apps are put in the cloud. I don't disagree, and I think that's probably true as far as enterprises go. Enterprises are generally the toughest customers to satisfy because their requirements are so much more extensive. More than just recoverability, you have transaction volume requirements, auditing, systems management, and service levels that must be met. Read more
Sorry…The EC2 Cloud Is Full, Come Back Later
Submitted by Mitchell Ashley on Mon, 05/04/09 - 2:52am.We all envision the cloud to be an on demand resource where at anytime we can add computing and storage capacity at the drop of the hat. Simply bring on as many virtual servers or as much disk storage as needed, when needed. That’s one of the most important value propositions of cloud computing and storage services. That’s the idea and vision behind cloud computing anyway, though I’ve had that bubble kind of burst for me last week while using Amazon’s EC2 service. Read more
5 Tactics Microsoft Is Using To Battle Linux for Cloud Dominance
Submitted by Mitchell Ashley on Fri, 04/03/09 - 3:02am.Can Microsoft really battle Linux for dominance of the cloud? It's a one versus many proposition. Sides have been chosen and the battle lines are clear. The Cloud Manifesto developed by Sun, IBM, RedHat, Amazon and Google, didn't include participation by Microsoft. Read more
Podcast: It takes a village in the cloud
Submitted by Mitchell Ashley on Wed, 10/22/08 - 8:54am.Not to be undone by others in the industry, Savvis announced its SaaS Platform initiative at the end of September. Because Savvis is one of the first top-tier companies to put such a comprehensive program together, I asked Bryan Doerr to join me on the Converging On Microsoft podcast. Savvis has taken a "best of" approach, borrowing ideas from Jamcracker and OpSource for the software-as-a-service marketplace component of the offering. Read more
Windows in the cloud now from Amazon, ServePath
Submitted by Microsoft Subnet on Mon, 10/06/08 - 6:59pm.Windows in the cloud isn't all vaporware, only Microsoft's version of it is. Last week, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels' announced that Amazon's cloud server, EC2, now supports Windows Server and with that, it runs many of the most popular Windows apps. (EC2 customers can run ASP.NET Web sites using Internet Information Server with Microsoft SQL Server as the database, for instance.) Read more
Office Cloud Breaks Through Headwind
Submitted by Mitchell Ashley on Fri, 10/03/08 - 8:30am.Windows Cloud OS and Office Live Lite Office apps. Well, Ballmer is turning out to be quite the hype machine himself, releasing the industry buzzhounds with his Windows Cloud pre-announcement this week. Finally, something juicy to speculate and write about. The shine wore off Google Chrome long ago, and I'm getting tired of waiting for Congress to pass my individual bailout package. Read more
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