Learning from Amazon's cloud collapse, (Mashable)

Learning from Amazon's cloud collapse

(Mashable) -- Call it Cloudgate, Cloudpocalyse or whatever you'd like, but the extended collapse of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) is both a setback for cloud computing and an opportunity for us to figure out how to stop it from happening again.
Amazon may be best-known for its online shopping site, but it also has a substantial cloud computing business. It provides a scalable, flexible and particularly efficient solution for companies to store and deliver massive amounts of content.
Its model of only paying for what you consume was a radical innovation when it launched in 2006.
In fact, Amazon Web Services has been so affordable and reliable that thousands of companies from Foursquare to Netflix utilize the company's cloud computing technology and servers to run their businesses.
They put their faith in Amazon's cloud because there was no reason to think that it would falter. One of cloud computing's key tenants is reliability through redundancy of both servers and data centers.
Then on Wednesday, Amazon's northern Virginia data center started experiencing problems that caused major latency and connectivity issues.
The trouble was apparently due to excessive re-mirroring of its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes -- this essentially created countless new backups of the EBS volumes that took up Amazon's storage capacity and triggered a cascading effect that caused downtime on hundreds (or more likely thousands) of websites for almost 24 hours.
The collapse took its share of victims. Among the most prominent companies affected were Foursquare, Quora, Hootsuite, SCVNGR, Heroku, Reddit and Wildfire, though hundreds of other companies big and small were affected.
Luckily, one of Amazon's most prominent customers, Netflix, didn't experience problems because it's built for the loss of an entire data center, while companies relying on Amazon's four other global data centers didn't experience too many issues.
A learning moment
FathomDB founder Justin Santa Barbara has a detailed post on his blog about what may be the biggest problem to come out of this week's collapse: Amazon's cloud redundancies failed to stop a mass outage.
Its Availability Zones are supposed to be able to fail independently without bringing the whole system down. Instead, there was a single point of failure that shouldn't have been there.
This week's disaster in the cloud is a reminder to startups to build redundancy into their applications and their own systems, but as Santa Barbara points out, most startups don't have the time or resources to engineer for multiple cloud systems (each Amazon global region/data center has its own rules and features, making a simple "switch" to another center difficult).
These companies trusted Amazon to keep them online, and Amazon failed to deliver.
Catastrophic issues will always occur, but in the pre-cloud era, downtime only affected a single computer or website. Today, a catastrophic event takes down thousands of websites, causing millions or even billions of dollars in lost revenue and productivity.
This incident is no reason for us to shun cloud computing, though. Its benefits (scalability, cost reduction, device independence, performance and more) far outweigh its cons.
We do need to take a hard look at how we structure our cloud infrastructure though and find new ways to either prevent single points of failure or quickly move content off failing clouds faster, especially as the world's computing power is consolidated into fewer and fewer systems.
Cloud computing is still in its infancy, and today's events make it clear that we still have a lot of work to do. It could be a whole lot worse next time if we aren't prepared.

See the original article at Mashable.com.

© 2010 MASHABLE.com. All rights reserved.

IBM Cloud Computing

The world is changing. A new reality is emerging for organizations of every size from every part of the planet. It’s called the cloud—a profound evolution of IT with revolutionary implications for business and society, creating new possibilities and enabling more efficient, flexible and collaborative computing models.
IBM is helping clients excel in cloud computing, providing secure and reliable Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (Paas) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions.

The 5 Best Cloud Clients/ Brighthub.com

Article by  Arun Kumar, MVP at brighthub.com
Cloud clients refers to the cloud service providers that offer cloud computing services. Based on their popularity and feedback on Internet, I have handpicked some of the best cloud clients so that you can decide which one suits your needs.

Read full article here: http://www.brighthub.com/environment/green-computing/articles/100564.aspx#ixzz1G2RC20jT

#1 Microsoft Cloud Storage

#2 Google Cloud

#3 IBM Cloud Computing

#4 Ubuntu Cloud Computing

#5 Mozy Cloud Computing

 

 

 

 

 

My Top Five Cloud Computing Predictions for 2011: John Savageau | Cloud Computing Journal

My Top Five Cloud Computing Predictions for 2011: John Savageau | Cloud Computing Journal

My Top Five Cloud Computing Predictions for 2011: John Savageau

1. ESBaaS Will Emerge in Enterprise Clouds. 
   Enterprise service bus as a service will begin to emerge within enterprise clouds to allow common messaging within applications among different organizational units.  This will further support standardization within an enterprise, as well as reduce lead times for applications development.
2. Enterprise Cloud Computing will Accelerate Data Center Consolidation. 
   As enterprises and governments continue to deal with the cost of operating individual data centers, consolidation will become a much more important topic.  As the consolidation process is planned, further migration to cloud computing and virtualized environments will become very attractive – if not critical – to all organizations.
   
   
   
3. Desktop Virtualization.  
   As we become more comfortable with Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365, and other desktop replacement environments, the need for high-powered desktop workstations will be reduced to power users.  In addition to the obvious attraction for better data protection and disaster recovery, the cost of expensive workstations and local application licenses makes little sense.  The first migration will be for those who are primarily connected via an organizational LAN, with road warriors and mobile users following as broadband becomes more ubiquitous.
4. SME Data Center Outsourcing into Public Clouds.  Small companies  requiring routine data center support, including office automation, servers, finance applications, and web presence, will find it difficult to justify installing their own equipment in a private or public colocation center.  In fact, it is unlikely savvy investors will support start up companies planning to operate their own data center, unless they are in an industry considered a very clear exception to normal IT requirements.
5. Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage will Look to PODs and Containers. 
   Microsoft and Google have proven the concept on a large scale, now the rest of the cloud computing and data center industry will take notice and begin to consider compute and storage capacity as a utility.  As a utility the compute, storage, switching, and communications components will take advantage of greater efficiencies and design flexibility of moving beyond the traditional data center concrete.  This will further support the idea of distributed cloud computing, portability, cloud exchanges, and cloud spot markets in 2012…

© 2008 SYS-CON Media Inc.

US Army Plans Private Cloud

Army Plans Private Cloud

APC2, the Army Private Cloud, will be a cornerstone of a broader data center consolidation initiative that aims to reduce the number of Army data centers from 200 to less than 20.

By J. Nicholas Hoover
InformationWeek
July 30, 2010 08:00 AM

The Army is pushing forward with plans to deploy a private cloud computing environment. Last week, it issued a request for proposals for the project, which will be one of the cornerstones of a broader data center consolidation initiative that aims to reduce the number of Army data centers from 200 to less than 20. The Army Private Cloud, also known as APC2, will be contracted out in two separate pieces, and could cost as much as $249 million over the five-year lifespan of those contracts, according to the RFP and associated documents.

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It also warned this would wipe out the $200 billion business empire he'd spent his life building.

Meanwhile, a few hundred miles south, on the banks of the Columbia River, a mysterious outfit known only as "Design, LLC," quietly constructed two massive windowless warehouses.

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Oracle Claims Victory Over EC; Says Sun Will Sell Clouds- from sys-con.com

Oracle Claims Victory Over EC; Says Sun Will Sell Clouds

Oracle Keynote at Cloud Expo

Cloud Computing Expo - Oracle expects the European Commission to wave its acquisition of Sun through next month MySQL and all without any annoying conditions.

Oracle president Safra Catz, who’s been wrestling with the EC, said so when the company posted its fiscal second-quarter results Thursday, another reason Oracle’s going to have a Merry Christmas.

Catz took a bunch of Oracle users to an EC hearing a week ago to buttress the company’s claims that the EC had put words in users’ mouths to support the theory of harm it manufactured to try to stop Oracle from getting MySQL.

Oracle Named Exclusive Diamond Sponsor of Cloud Expo 2010

The meeting was backed by a write-in campaign from hundreds of users as well as a letter from the US Senate and a public statement from the Justice Department.

A grateful Catz said, “I want to thank all of our customers for the overwhelming support they have given us during this process.”

After further discussions with the agency over the weekend Oracle Monday made a few relatively non-restrictive promises regarding MySQL so the EC could leave the stage with its dignity intact. It still has until January 27. It will be curious to see it takes that long.

Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison, who blamed the EC’s foot-dragging for Sun losing $100 million a month to rivals said he expects “Sun to rapidly improve both its market share and margins once this merger closes,” claiming that “Sun’s new Sparc Solaris system and Sun’s new Exadata database machine both run the Oracle database faster than IBM’s fastest computer.”

Ellison reckons the Exadata-style business is the future of computing and worth billions of dollars.

During a conference call Ellison said Sun had no talent for selling high-volume, low-margin x86 machines and would leave that business to Dell and HP. Instead it will focus on the high-performance end peddling SMP machines and private clouds based on both Sun Solaris operating system and Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux and complete with integrated storage and networking.

Oracle’s Q2 beat the Street and the numbers hint that enterprise spending might be coming back into fashion again.

Oracle earned $1.46 billion, or 29 cents a share, up 15%, on revenues up 4% to $5.9 billion, pushing past the $5.69 billion expected. On a non-GAAP basis it realized 39 cents a share, three cents better than expected.

New software license revenues were up 2% to $1.7 billion, versus the $1.54 billion expected. Software updates and support revenues were up 14% to $3.2 billion.

The company’s operating income was up 10% to $2.2 billion and operating margin was up 200 basis points to 37%. Operating cash flow on a trailing 12-month basis was $8.7 billion, up 7%.

In a prepared statement, CFO Jeff Epstein said, “We delivered results which were substantially better than we expected on both the top and bottom line, growing non-GAAP operating margins by 280 basis points to 49%, the highest Q2 non-GAAP operating margin in our history.”

Oracle claimed it took market share from SAP in every region around the world for the fourth consecutive quarter. President Charles Phillips said that in constant currency, “our applications business grew 1% in the Americas and 2% in Asia Pacific versus a negative 35% and negative 34% respectively for SAP.”

Catz said Sun, for all its losses, is still expected to bring Oracle $1.5 billion in operating income. Leaving Sun out – Oracle will redo its predictions next month – she forecast software license revenues to grow this quarter somewhere between minus 1% to up 9% and revenue to be up 3%-6% with non-GAAP ESP of 36 cents-38 cents

© 2008 SYS-CON Media Inc.

IBM launched the IBM Cloud Academy

IBM today launched the IBM Cloud Academy, a global forum for educators, researchers and information technology (IT) personnel from the education industry to pursue cloud computing initiatives, develop skills and share best practices for reducing operating costs while improving quality and access to education