Cloud Computing Digest

A month has passed since my last update, so I have a lot to share. I’ll try to keep the run-on sentences to a minimum and go heavy on the linkage.

The security of cloud solutions has been very much on everyone’s mind of late.  First off was a story from Mat Honan of WIRED magazine on how his online identity was stolen. Because of some failed security of two key entities, and the highly linked nature of his devices via cloud services, hackers quickly took control of his online persona. He details are a bit terrifying but also offer some good findings on how to protect yourself. This is further highlighted by an article from TechNewsWorld.com that discusses the issues with consumer facing services and the cloud.

But vendors work to address this with Amazon announcing it is joining the Cloud Security Alliance’s registry. Rightscale, the IaaS management provider also published an article on PCI guidance in the cloud. Microsoft also announced that it will to offer a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for Windows Azure’s core services , a key item for those that require HIPAA compliance.

As if security issues weren’t enough, we’ve also seen some could service disruptions. Windows Azure experienced an outage in its Western Europe region on July 26^th. Google’s Talk service also had an outage about the same time but it was unrelated. Mind you that Google’s issue came just 3 days after it announced that its Compute Engine would help it avoid outages like those that affected Amazon earlier this year.

But in the face of these challenges, there is hope for the increased adoption of cloud technologies. The European Commission is finalizing its strategy in hopes of promoting the use of cloud for data storage. Given that data sovereignty issues in the EU are especially challenging, this is great news.

Amazon also released some compelling arguments for cloud computing with results of a study they commissioned showing a 626% ROI for cloud. This was a timely bit of news given the first ever Amazon Web Services global conference.

On a bit of a network geeky note, I did found an interesting article about Skype’s infrastructure and the concept of “supernodes”.  There were some theory’s that the move of Skype’s infrastructure into Microsoft Datacenters may have been a move to monitor traffic. But this article points out that something like Skype can honestly benefit from having the bandwidth available to it that these massive cloud computing datacenters can provide.

And likely the biggest announcement of recent weeks is that Netflix has made good on their promise to open source their Chaos Monkey. I can’t wait to have time to dig into this piece of software. The more cloud software I get involved in, the more things like resilient, self-healing systems come into play. And this will be a great tool to help test those types of systems to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to do.

Until next time!

Busy news week, so prepare for some rapid fire items.

My first link is to an editorial on Toolbox.com about transforming the enterprise for cloud. What I like about this article is that its recommend they in for opportunities instead of just hoping that bringing something new in will make things better.

Microsoft fired a major volley in their battle with Google over office productivity with the announcement of Office 2013. The newest version is fully cloud enables and rumors are that since it can be streamed to a workstation, that we may see the ability to buy a “subscription” card similar to Xbox Live point cards that can be used to download the newest Office suite. And according to CNet’s Don Reisinger, this is only part of a strategy to stop the defection to Google Apps.

As if this wasn’t enough, Microsoft has also offered up a beta/preview of their Windows Azure Service Bus product for on-premises deployment and a new app model for Office 365. And if that wasn’t enough, they announced an option that will allow hosting providers to host their own version Windows Azure. It seems like initial this is a flavor of Windows Azure Web Sites, but can the rest be too far behind?

I found a great article on lesson’s learned by Dropbox from Rajiv Eranki. This insight into how they went from 4,000 to 40,000,000 users is incredible! Not only does he explain some great practices, but also some of the technology they use. If you’re looking to build a scalable system, be sure to read this post.

Ben Kepes is back this week with an article on preparing developers for the cloud future. I often joke about the next generation of COBOL programmers (keep in mind I’ve written my share). It looks like Ben shares my sentiment.

And if you’re in the mood or listen rather than read, I found a panel recording from QCon London 2012 discussing what cloud architectures could look like in years. We could be in for a really wild ride!

And I’ll close out this edition with something I rarely include here. Humor. The Onion, the satirical news site, discusses HP doing ‘that cloud thing’. Reportedly, the engineers at HP find it pretty funny as well. J So enjoy.

Until next time!

Quick plug… If you’re in the Ohio river valley area and you’re into Cloud Computing, you should consider attending Cloud Develop 2012 on August 3^rd in Columbus, Ohio. Please support the community and the event by getting registered! More info at: http://clouddevelop.org/

If it’s not one thing it’s another I guess. Still trying to get this back to a weekly digest but there always seems to be a distraction. So before some other distraction arises, let’s make some cloud computing news.

I’ll start off with a “first impression” post by Ben Kepes and his thoughts on Google’s new Compute Engine IaaS offering (announced at the GoogleIO conference on June 28^th, 2012).  The short version is that while it’s a nice start, Google will have some work to do before they can win the enterprise.

The comparisons continue with John Furrier’s matchup of GCE and Windows Azure. John’s opinion is that it will come down to who wins the developers. I personally feel it’s more about winning the hearts and minds of the decision makers.

I also found a blog post about best practices for Amazon Web Services. It discusses creating high availability solutions via multiple distributed deployments in different geographies. Just a few weeks later, the massive storms that hammered the eastern half of the United States caused a partial outage at Amazon’s data centers in the region.

The Washington Post reported on how this called into question the viability of cloud computing. Netflix, who weathered an outage early last year without issue was even impacted this time around. But like all good cloud computing adopters, learned from the experience and is applying that learning to make their solution better.

As if this wasn’t enough, not even a week later, Salesforce experienced an outage that disrupted its CRM software as a service solution. While the multi-hour outage was a serious impact to some clients, the bigger issue for many was a lack of communication.

In brighter news, VMware has acquired cloud automation provider DynamicOps. This will dramatically increase VMware’s ability to help drive adoption of their public and private cloud offerings and enhance their existing solution offerings such as vCenter Operations Management Suite.

My final three links for this edition all follow a common theme. Which cloud is better? Private vs Public? PaaS vs. IaaS? VendorA vs VendorM? Ben Kepes, this time for CloudAve, talks about how both public and private cloud solutions have their place. Randy Bias of CloudScaling.com also talks about the right cloud (and storage) for your application. And lastly, Adron Hall over at CompositeCode took a walk in the IaaS world to see how it compared to Pass.

Until next time!

Three weeks on, one missed but given the holiday weekend here in the US, I’m hoping you’ll cut me some slack. No more apologies though, time for the news!

The first article I have is on the ability for cloud to help support growth. Pinterest (which recently was valued at $1.5 billion) has grown by about 10 fold since August of last year, with only 31 or so employees right now. This growth has been powered largely by leveraging of Amazon’s EC2 and HighScalability.com has called out the highlights of this growth.

Security always comes up in cloud discussions, but not often do you hear about someone looking at the cost comparisons between cloud and traditional solutions. Well I recently found an article regarding the company SkyWire and how they cut costs from $90,000 to $330 a month. Infomercial Disclaimer: individual results may vary. J

From Opscode 2012 we get a 20 minute video from Jon-Paul Sullivan of HP on how HP built their public cloud offering. I always appreciate insight into how these things are created and managed. Even though I’m more appdev and infrastructure, it never ceases to fascinate me.

Now back to HighScalability.com for an article on the 20 common bottlenecks you’ll encounter building highly scalable solutions. Some of these should be obvious, but others are things that application/solution developers don’t always consider. So print this list out and pin it to the cubicle wall of your architects!

From news in my backyard, General Mills used Windows Azure to help power its attempt to move into the Gluten-Free food market. This is a great example of a company you wouldn’t normally think could leverage cloud (manufacturing) to support the growth of its business via a new product offering (the start-up pattern).

A bit of a fluff piece this week is SAP’s list of top 50 #cloudcomputing tweeps. I already follow many folks on this list, but it’s always nice to look these things over and see if there’s anyone else I can be following.

I don’t mention Rackspace often enough, but from their CloudU certificate program and Notebook blog come a great little piece on the challenges of cloud adoption. I highly recommend taking 10 minutes to check out the article and its associated video.

I tend to overlook (and sometimes outright dismiss) private cloud. Most of it just strikes me as cloudwashing of infrastructure optimization. But I’m not a complete purist. So here we go with a prediction from back in March on the top 5 private cloud computing trends for 2012.

And finally to my happy/safe place… Microsoft recently unveiled its Azure Accelerator. This isn’t some new software or hardware but instead a facility/group/program focused specifically on helping startups get going with Windows Azure.  If this wasn’t enough, be sure to register for the free, virtual, June 7^th event, Meet Windows Azure. Word is that this even will have lots of new announcements ahead of TechEd NA 2012.

Until next time!

This week I’d like to welcome Rajesh Kolla, a Sogeti colleague and friend from our Houston office. Rajesh will be joining me on these digests as a guest author.

Did you ever feel that the term “Cloud computing” is being (mis)used in numerous contexts?  If so, you are not alone. Here are four reasons  that could provide some insight on why the term is so confusing.

I am sure that you might have observed that “mobility” and “cloud” are buzz words that have been floating around for a while. Here is an article that hints about the bright future of “mobile cloud”.

Amazon launches Dynamic Content support in CloudFront offering to improve performance and reliability of web sites with dynamic content.

HP’s cloud offerings enter into public beta and here is more information on these.

Whenever there is a cloud conversation with clients, security tops the list of concerns that are expressed. But here is a recent study report that showcases savings on security spending by SMB’s and provides compelling security argument for the cloud.

As we all know that, not all enterprise applications can/should be migrated to cloud right away.  This is when hybrid cloud comes into play. Here are the top 10 tips by cloud experts for enterprises building hybrid clouds.

If Ruby developers have admiration for Heroku, what do .NET developers have for cloud other than Windows Azure?  See here how a six-person startup trying to woo .NET developers and compete with Windows Azure.

Also last but not least, don’t forget to catch exciting Azure announcements live on 06/07. If you have not register for MeetWindowsAzure virtual event already, you can do so here right after reading this digest.

- Rajesh

Here we are back for my second update in a row. Not being “on the road” has its perks. Still to early to call this a trend yet, but hopefully I can start getting back into my old habits. But enough about me, on to this week’s digest.

I often post articles here on things moving to the cloud. But I ran across an interesting article on why Zynga, the massively successful casual game company, moved from Amazon’s EC2 back to hosting their own resources. This isn’t a failure of cloud. Instead it’s a great story of leveraging the cloud to help you meet unexpected demands. Public cloud doesn’t have to be a life-long commitment.

Even if it’s not a permanent commitment, the choice of a public cloud provider can be difficult. Connected System Microsoft MVP Richard Seroter wrote a great blog post recently on why he usually leans towards AWS (Amazon Web Services) over Microsoft’s Windows Azure. To sum it up, I’ll take a line my father taught me back when I spent my summer’s helping me on construction sites. Use the right tool, for the right job. There is no single tool for everything.

I know I spend most of these digests on platforms and providers, but it’s also important to look at individual products/solutions and ponder what problems they are trying to solve.  A recent editorial over at cloudcomments.com highlights this by looking at what DynamoDB can teach us about the future of cloud.

Questions about cloud will continue, but it’s nice to see the cloud used for solutions that simply couldn’t be easily addressed on-premises. A great example of this is two companies that partnered up and used 50,000 cores in Amazon to run a HPC (High Performance Computing) job to screen potential cancer drugs. This type of temporary, massive scale up of compute is a great example of using cloud to extend your traditional infrastructure.

I mentioned in the last digest that cloud computing jobs are really starting to take off. But the number of experts available to fill those positions continues to lag. Well the providers themselves are starting to step into the game and deliver consulting services. I have been asked where to find cloud talent and I always tell folks the same thing, grown it. Find those talented folks in your own organization and support them. BTW, did I mention that Sogeti is hiring.

And lastly, I need to give props to my colleague Leigh Sperberg down in Texas who gave me a heads up on Cisco’s 2012 Global Cloud Networking Survey results. Aside from some nifty sound bites and an info graphic, this survey does help highlight the chasm between development and infrastructure when it comes to how they view cloud computing. You can access the PDF version of these occasionally hilarious results here.

Until next time!

I’m making a resolution that this blob will be updated at least once a week for the next two months. Even if I have to enlist some assistance in making that happen. Ok, I was planning to do that anyways. J So without further delay, here’s another edition…

Those of us that do cloud computing know how difficult it is to acquire talent. So it may come as no surprise that the demand for cloud jobs is now stratospheric as InfoWorld points out.

Back in January VMware, a company I don’t mention here nearly as often as I should, blogged on using their vCloud Services to create secure hybrid cloud solutions (solutions which leverage both on-premises and externally hosted resources). It’s admittedly more of a fluff/marketing piece. But still helpful if you’re trying to get an idea of what’s available.

Something I can’t wait to get my own hands on, Netflix has announced they will be open sourcing a “simian army”. You may be familiar with their use of a Chaos Monkey utility to aid in ensuring the resiliency of their cloud architecture. Well this announcement means they plan to make portions of these “monkey” tools available to the public.

And things continue to go back and forth in the hosted office suite battles. Google filed a lawsuit over how the Department of the Interior handled an opportunity for its hosted solutions and how they were awarded to Microsoft’s Office 365. As a result, The Department of the Interior has reversed the decision and awarded the contract to Google.

I don’t often enough mention success stories or “how to’s” here, so I wanted to call out this story from Oxygen Cloud. The article discusses how Oxygen Cloud built a private 55tb storage cloud as they put it, on a budget.

I keep doing these digests to document my own learning’s and hopefully help others learn as well. So I think it’s prudent to mention my latest discovery, a cloud I wasn’t even aware of, Softlayer. I’d seen the name mentioned but never really looked at it until now. Silly me! As you can see from this article by Gigaom, Softlayer is running some of the internet’s hottest properties.

And unless you were hiding under a rock, you likely heard about Instagram being purchased by Facebook, Perhaps even more notable is the infrastructure that Facebook is acquiring as a result. Those of us in the traditional enterprise or small/medium business spaces tend to forget how heterogeneous the environments of startups can be. And when it comes to building these massively scalable solutions, you really have to be willing to leverage multiple tools to get the job done.

And to close out this edition, the big news is that Citrix is moving away from OpenStack and has given the CloudStack solution over to the Apache Software Foundation. Only time will tell if this is the right or wrong move.

Until next time!

Welcome to another edition of the “supposedly weekly but lately more like monthly” Cloud Computing Digest. I’m lining up a few folks to help me get this back to a weekly feature so here’s hoping that it pays off going forward. In the meantime, here’s the news.

I’m going to start off the biggest news of the last 30 days, the service disruption that affected Windows Azure. While this was significant, there wasn’t nearly as much press given to this as the spring 2011 disruption suffered by Amazon. This was likely due in no small part to the fact that there are reportedly not as many high-profile, public facing applications running on Windows Azure.

Also from Microsoft’s camp, we have an explanation of Microsoft’s $130 million expansion of its Dublin cloud data center and a push by Tim O’Brien, general manager of Platform Strategy at Microsoft to help win over the hearts of more developers. And there is Wordament, a start-up founded by several folks from Microsoft and running on Windows Azure. Their blog discusses their decision to host their application in Windows Azure. We also have a success story from a U.K. based armored transportation company that is not handling truck tracking via an application at least partially hosted in Windows Azure.

But enough Microsoft news….

The EU is making steps towards having a less restrictive, but more appetizing, union wide version of its existing data protection laws. This could, if accepted across the union, make it much easier to operate across all 27 member states.

NIST has also reared its head again, issuing its official guidelines on public cloud security and privacy. I’ve only read the cliff notes version, but what I’ve read so far falls solidly the “common sense” category.

I did run across a new term, “cloud jitter”. This refers to inconsistency in performance you may see running cloud, or more generally virtualized applications. While I don’t discount the observations David Lithicum’s observations in the article, I would also caution that the size & scope of these jitters will depend on the platform and the workload. So it’s important to test your solution to see what’s happening under a sustained load.

From the world of Amazon, we have news that Amazon is increasing their cloud privacy settings with some enhancements to their Direct Connect product offering. Amazon also announced some pricing drops, both for S3 and EC2, RDS, EMR, and ElastiCache. The cloud vendor price wars should only continue to drive prices down.

And to close things out, I have a blog post from Richard Seroter on multi-cloud deployment of an ASP.NET application. This stresses the need to keep your options open. And hopefully will drive the vendors to eventually start supporting open standards that make it easier to have applications that can be easily hosted on multiple platforms.

Until next time!

Wow! Has it really been over a month since my last update? I’ve been so busy it seemed like there was always something else I needed to do. And I still don’t feel like I’ve accomplished half of what I needed to over the last month. But enough excuses…

To start things off, I have a 6 part blog series on cloud computing by Paul Culmsee. While a bit lengthy, it’s definitely worth a read. Even seasoned cloud computing folks should find a new thought or two here.

I found a good article on how twitter handles the load it does from a web site I recommend to anyone looking to build large scale web sites, Highscalability.com. There’s some great lessons learned here.

In the same vein, we have Adrian Cockcroft, cloud architect for Netflix. In this version of his defrag 2011 presentation. What makes this post good is that it is about changing the conversation. It is about how to change the way you do things to allow your organization to be innovative.

SLAs, they are supposed to make us feel safe. But I always caution folks to fully understand what the SLAs cover. Wired.com’s CloudLine put up a post that really helps drive this home.

Randy Bias, one of the industries thought leaders in cloud computing put up a great blog post on what 2011 did for cloud. There’s some excellent retrospective here. So take a few minutes and give this a read.

In what I think is the most interesting post I have for this edition, I have a post on taking the complexity out of cloud computing, or at least hiding it. Its quick and gives you some good concepts to ponder.

And for my final item, I have a bit of humor that came to me from a colleague, a 1956 commercial of a “cloud computer”. Enjoy!

Until next time!

Happy 2012 folks! I took some time off over the holidays to recharge my batteries and it appears to be paying off. It’s been slow getting back into things but today I’m feeling good and ready to focus on knocking out some of my todo’s. First off my list today, a new Cloud Computing Digest.

Fellow Azure MVP Roger Jennings got to take a peek at HP’s new hosted cloud services. In this post, he walks through the sign-up and provisioning process. A nice starting point with plenty of screen shots if you’re curious but don’t have time to explore it yourself.

I think this is a first in that I have an update that’s a YouTube link. It’s an interview with an executive at Lionsgate Entertainment (the movie company) for their innovative cloud usage. I always tell people that any industry could use cloud, and it’s nice to see yet another example supporting it.

James Urquhart, whom I’ve linked to several times, has started posting at GIGAOM. Recently, this included an editorial on why it’s hard to talk about cloud. Some of this is about terminology; some of it is about the way we look at managing things. Regardless, it’s some good food for thought.

Office 365 has been criticized, especially in the EU for its data privacy challenges. However, it was recently announced that Office 365 complies with Data Protection and Security standards in both the EU and US.  They also updated the web site for this information, trust.office365.com to make this information more accessible.

I’ve beaten this dead horse a few times, SLA from vendors. They’re sometimes confusing, and most times not very worthwhile. But maybe we need an industry standard for this? At least that’s what Michelle Boisvert asks in her editorial.

From across the pond, comes news that Microsoft is leveraging open source solutions to help compete with the Linux based public cloud providers. As pricing continues to be driven down by competition, it’s going to be features that differentiate vendors. Microsoft is trying to partner with open source solutions to help bring them into the Windows Azure fold.

The Google App implementation for the City of Los Angeles is back in the news. After months of delays, the Los Angeles Police Department has pulled the plug. This doesn’t appear to mean that Google Apps is out of the city entirely, just that it wasn’t able to meet the needs several departments and subsequently they have been removed from the contract. Regardless, it is still a blow to cloud adoption.

To close out this first digest of 2012, I’ll share a 2012 outlook from Network World. They see a growth in migration services and mobile device management and monitoring. We’ll also see more services being released to help speed adoption of the cloud solutions by leveraging value added services. As education on cloud capabilities, limitations, and opportunities continues to grow, there should also be a removal of some barriers to adoption, thus helping cloud computing to continue to grow even faster in 2012 than it did in 2011.

I’m on the road next week attending/presenting at the CodeMash conference in Sandusky, OH. So I’m not sure I’ll get another update out. If you’re in the neighborhood, be sure to stop by and say hi.

Until next time!