Cloud Computing Digest

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!