Category: Amazon.com
August 28th, 2009
When is a cloud not a cloud?
The answer to the question I’ve posed in my title is blindingly obvious, yet it seems to be one of those things that never hits you between the eyes until one day, something makes you stop and just think it through.
For myself, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought over the past 6-12 months, and recently I delivered a talk on the topic at CloudCamp London in July, called Captive Clouds Can’t Connect (the clue to the answer is in the title). I’ve been thinking about it some more this month because OpSource [important disclosure] is paying me to write a white paper related to the launch today of its enterprise offering. Together with Amazon’s announcement less than 48 hours ago of its Virtual Private Cloud, it has all brought this topic to a head.
So what is the simple, blindingly obvious answer to my headline question? It’s this:
A cloud is not a cloud when it’s not in the cloud.
OK, evidently, to make some sense of this answer, you need to be clear in your mind what you mean by ‘cloud’. A lot of people — often for quite understandable reasons — feel very uncomfortable about the ramifications of moving computing to the cloud, and therefore they try and confine it within familiar boundaries where they feel more comfortable. They persuade themselves that, so long as they include some of the recognized characteristics of cloud computing, such as a virtualized infrastructure and some notion of metered usage, then they’ve still captured its essence, without having to stray beyond the confines of their existing enterprise infrastructure.
So let me take you back for a moment to the origins of the term ‘cloud’ and show you the flaw in that line of thinking. In the early days of the Internet, when people first started connecting their computer systems to this unknowable, amorphous, globally shared, wide area network, they Read the rest of this entry »
May 5th, 2009
Web giants and the helpless individual
Like many users of technology today, I have developed an essentially dysfunctional approach when things don’t work properly: I do whatever it takes to avoid fixing it. I wait to see if it ‘fixes itself’. I make a workaround. I live with it till the next upgrade. Or I just use something else. It’s only when I absolutely can’t function without resolving the problem that I take a deep breath, grit my teeth, and embark on the quest to find a solution.
My worst nightmare is to find myself in the kind of situation frequently described in anguished blog posts by victims of Google, Amazon or eBay glitches and terminations. I’ve been collecting a few samples recently:
- When Amazon fails, it does so big time ranted fellow Enterprise Irregular Dennis Howlett last weekend after an ill-fated attempt to buy a high-spec digital camera from the online retailer. A security exception on his order triggered a defective process that closed his account with no viable means of getting it reopened.
- Nobody Can Hear You Scream If Your RSS Feed Is Dead wrote Louis Gray back in March when a glitch at Blogger wiped out his entire RSS feed, including all archives (among other casualties of the same glitch, Kent Newsome provided an entertaining and informative account).
- Google is Evil, Worse than PayPal: Don’t use Google Checkout for your business wrote Amy Hoy later the same month when her website’s Checkout account was disabled with no notification, no explanation and no appeal.
- Don’t ever use Google Apps for anything important, wrote an anonymous poster to the Business of Software discussion community in January after being “stuck in this kafkaesque place” that is Google Apps support. [Updated 5 May at 22:52. An earlier version of this item incorrectly attributed the comment to Joel Spolsky, who is not having any problems with Google].
- Hello, Google, is anyone in there? I wrote last summer after several incidents when Googla Apps users were locked out of their accounts with no information.
As is the norm when these mass-market automated online services fail, the victims Read the rest of this entry »
February 26th, 2009
Another outage, another dashboard
From the I-told-you-so department. Finally, Google has followed a long line of leading SaaS and cloud providers trying to break into the enterprise market in introducing a status dashboard for Google Apps.
I called on Google to do this in August last year, warning that if the company didn’t do so, it would not only be bad for Google’s reputation but also for the rest of the industry:
“If it doesn’t take suitable action, the snowballing subscriber volumes of businesses that are signing up for Google Apps are going to get a poor introduction to SaaS, which is no good for Google and bad for the industry as a whole.”
So, yesterday there was a Gmail outage and today, guess what? Google rolls out a status dashboard it just happened to have waiting in the wings. Why oh why do providers always, always have to wait until after a damaging outage before they do this? Wait, didn’t I already say that exactly one year ago? Read the rest of this entry »
August 5th, 2008
Amazon funds Elastra's enterprise cloud push
When Elastra launched in March, my ZDNet blogging colleague Dana Gardner wrote that the company “aims to become a de facto standard for accessing cloud resources.” But if it wanted to become a neutral broker of cloud computing, why did it accept lead funding from Amazon in its $12 million B round, as Dana reports today?
“Amazon is the leader in this area,” Elastra’s CEO Kirill Sheynkman told me when I put this question to him yesterday. “They agreed with us on our vision and believed in our technology. The plusses [of Amazon funding] far outweigh the minuses.”
Potential minuses include the likely reluctance of Amazon’s cloud competitors to work too closely with a company that might be seen as in its pocket. But Elastra is betting that won’t matter if it wins broad acceptance in the enterprise market. Most of the cloud build-outs happening at the moment are private clouds, either within corporate data centers or at hosting centers operated by the likes of IBM, HP and — announced today — AT&T. If Elastra can become the de facto standard for managing deployments to those private enterprise clouds, then everyone else will have to fall in line.
The upside for Amazon is that enterprises using Elastra will find it easy to migrate deployments between their private clouds and Amazon’s EC2 platform. Maybe today few IT managers are comfortable with trusting Amazon’s compute resources, Read the rest of this entry »
July 21st, 2008
S3 outage: time to double up
Probably the best presentation at London Cloud Camp last Wednesday was the one the organizers saved until last: Alan Williamson spoke about Mediafed’s experiences as a company that relies on cloud providers. Mediafed specializes in providing RSS traffic analytics to European media companies, with a blue-chip client roster that includes BBC Worldwide, LeMonde, The Guardian, IDG, Axel Springer and others. Williamson’s advice will be heeded by many wondering what to do after Amazon S3’s 6-hour long outage yesterday:
“We’ve come to realize we cannot rely on putting all our eggs in one basket,” he said, explaining that Mediafed uses two cloud providers side-by-side: Amazon and UK-based Flexiscale. “We run both at the same time.” Some customers are on one and some on the other, but all are backed up to the other cloud so that if one fails the service can switch across to the other — which presumably means its customers can still this morning access all their stats from yesterday’s RSS traffic, even during the hours that S3 was down.
Anyone concerned about what Om Malik is calling the fragility of cloud services after yesterday’s outage needs to consider putting a similar set-up into place. Frankly, I think Malik has it completely wrong — it’s not the cloud that’s fragile, it’s computers, and anyone who expects perfect uptime when relying on a single point of failure has their head, not just their infrastructure, in the clouds. Either you stay cool, like SmugMug, and accept occasional glitches as part of the value proposition you pay for; or you do what Mediafed has done and put some redundancy and a failover plan in place.
As Williamson said in his presentation, there are plenty more risks to worry about besides systems outages: “My heart is fearful of the credit card stopping at Amazon. It scares the bejesus out of me that’s going to happen at Amazon.” For all its benefits, the cloud is still no silver bullet. Working with the cloud means getting savvy about a whole new set of issues, such as becoming expert in building server infrastructure that monitors your cloud resources, or solving hairy back-up and archiving challenges (Mediafed recently calculated that it is now storing so much data in the cloud that it would take three weeks to download a back-up of its S3 data). Williamson concluded: “We appreciate that cloud computing has moved us on but [now] we’ve got a whole set of new problems.”
See also these posts about previous outages at Amazon Web Services:
April 17th, 2008
Amazon Web Services gets serious about enterprise
It now seems that Amazon is moving aggressively to make its cloud computing services palatable for enterprise users — not surprising, given that enterprises including The New York Times and Nasdaq are now customers, according to a BusinessWeek report this week. Today it announced two enterprise-class paid support options along with a Service Health Dashboard (screenshot after the jump) that’s clearly modeled on the one pioneered by Salesforce.com a couple of years back. From a business perspective, these new services are even more significant than the new storage options announced earlier this week.
As posted by Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr today in a blog posting titled May We Help You?, there are two support levels:
- Silver, starting at $100 per month, gives access to new AWS Support Center, with personalized Web support, case tracking and guaranteed response times during US office hours (6am - 6pm Pacific) Monday to Friday.
- Gold, starting at $400, includes all of the above plus personalized phone support and around the clock (24×7x365) coverage.
If you’re a big user of Amazon Web Services, your support fees are calculated at a base rate of 10 percent on top of your monthly usage fees. Barr’s blog post makes it absolutely clear that the new services are in direct reponse to demand from serious enterprise customers:
“Increasingly, we see that organizations of all sizes are putting AWS to use in new, innovative, and mission-critical ways. These organizations have told us that they need a more direct and more discreet way to request assistance and to report problems.”
That little word “discreet” is the big giveaway — customers want to report problems and get them fixed without Read the rest of this entry »
April 15th, 2008
Squaring the cloud
Hosting your application in the cloud got a lot easier yesterday — but there are still some gaps to fill for hosted application providers. Referring to Amazon’s introduction of persistent storage volumes to its EC2 cloud computing service, Rightscale CEO Thorsten Von Eicken declared “clearly the cloud has just squared in size!” I’ll return to Van Eicken’s posting in a moment because he does a helpful run-through of some telling use cases for EC2’s new storage offering, as well as making some pretty strong claims for the significance of the announcement. But first I’d like to mention a couple of other developments.
First, there’s the interesting news that Google App Engine is more open than people first imagined. Over the weekend, developer Chris Anderson — who says he’d “never touched” the Python language before — implemented AppDrop.com, an Amazon EC2 instance where developers can host applications developed with the Google App Engine SDK. Writer and programmer Andy Baio explains how it works. Meanwhile, stack-as-a-service provider CohesiveFT has introduced a similar service that allows you to build your own App Engine virtual server, but this time deploy it to the cloud platform of your choice — whether Amazon EC2 or your own VMWare, Parallels or Xen system.
These options are highly reassuring to developers wanting to use App Engine to build and host applications, but worried about lock-in. It gives them an escape route, from Google’s own servers to an Amazon alternative, or even onto their own servers. Taken together with yesterday’s Amazon announcement, they provide ample evidence that the cloud, as measured by the number of options available out there, is getting exponentially bigger.
That’s all very well for experimentation or in-house deployments, of course, but if you’re an ISV that wants to offer an application commercially as a paid service, the cloud still needs squaring. At present Read the rest of this entry »
February 15th, 2008
Time for a Bezos trustworthy cloud initiative?
Sooner or later, it was inevitable that a server outage would expose Amazon’s lack of preparedness for failure. It’s ironic that this should have happened within hours of my posting an item here arguing that SaaS vendors should all rely on cloud providers for their infrastructure. Those that do rely on Amazon will be looking for far better outage management and service level reporting in the future than they’ve tolerated to date.
What I can’t understand is, why do providers only understand this after they’ve suffered a major outage? Salesforce.com learnt its lesson two years ago, and as a result its partial outage on Tuesday aroused little reaction. Why on earth Amazon couldn’t have invested in a similar system to keep customers informed is beyond me.
At least I can say, ‘I told you so’. This is from Time for Web 2.0 to get real, posted in June last year 2006:
… a complete disregard for accountability to their users among service providers … is nothing new. An article I commissioned from my Loosely Coupled colleague David Longworth in October 2004 reported on Web services without warranties. Here’s what [program manager for Amazon Web Services] Jeff Barr had to say about service level guarantees back then:
“We have not found it necessary to offer any kind of formal guarantee in this regard. What works best is to realize that our interests are aligned with the interests of our developers — if the service is not running then their sites are not running, and no transactions are occurring. Clearly, this is bad, and we do all that we can to make sure that it doesn’t happen.”
In other words, ‘If you’re down, we’re down, so trust us to stay up — after all, if you can’t trust Amazon, who can you trust?’ As I pointed out at the time in a blog posting entitled Rips in the Web 2.0 fabric, such breathtaking arrogance is characteristic of a vendor in the grip of what Geoffrey Moore called ‘the tornado‘. We all know where this kind of thing leads, as I wrote back then:
“Sure, there are going to be a lot of headaches when everyone has standardized on Web 2.0 services in a decade’s time. Gartner will come out with a damning report on the unrecognized TCO of on-demand services, and [Amazon CEO] Jeff Bezos will suddenly launch a ‘Trustworthy Services’ initiative in response to corporate concerns over alleged performance glitches …”
After all this, do I really think SaaS providers are going to trust cloud infrastructure? I think it keeps the debate open, but I think what today’s outage shows is not that the model is broken but that the execution needs fixing.
January 22nd, 2008
How to really make money with Web 2.0
One of the most significant announcements made around the turn of the year attracted very little attention at the time, despite its huge import for the way on-demand applications get created and marketed. I’m talking about Amazon DevPay. Silicon Valley’s online chatterati didn’t give it much of a second glance, but some of the developers I’ve been meeting with on my current visit here are digesting the implications with a growing sense of delight and awe.
In essence, DevPay matters to online applications because it will have the same incredible impact on startup economics as Google AdSense has had for online content. Anyone can start up a blog or an information site on the Web today, and if they attract a bit of traffic — especially if that traffic is interested in certain valuable keywords — then they can easily cover the costs of operating the website. The most successful make a substantial profit as well, even a decent living. DevPay enables developers to charge for their online applications with the same kind of ease. It does depend on buyers actually making payment, so there’s more friction than in the AdSense model. But on the other hand, it’s easier to offer value with an application than it is just with content. And a look back at the history of content monetization reveals that, even before AdSense took off, some people were already making big profits from selling content online. DevPay brings online applications to the same stage.
DevPay hasn’t attracted a lot of commentary because the Web 2.0 crowd is still focused on trying to grow big and then get VC funded, rather than simply earning a living from revenue that can be collected today. The trouble with get-big-and-monetize-later as a strategy is that most of its proponents are doomed to fail, because by definition only a handful will reach the top of the pile. The VC route is the one that gets all the headlines because that’s where the deals are done, but in reality it’s not much better than pyramid economics, Read the rest of this entry »
November 20th, 2007
RightScale makes EC2 a better fit for SaaS
Amazon.com CTO Dr Werner Vogels’ presentation at SIIA’s OnDemand Summit (see my previous posting) was punctuated by a demonstration performed by Thorsten von Eicken, CTO of RightScale, a start-up that provides a platform to manage cloud computing on EC2. Von Eicken has an impeccable SaaS pedigree, having been chief architect at ExpertCity, subsequently Citrix Online after the provider of the popular GoToMyPC service became part of Citrix Systems. But he’s had his fill of running massive multi-tenant data centers. “I’m not going back the five data centers I had in my previous job,” he said at the end of the demonstration.
The RightScale service, which itself runs on the Amazon.com platform, automates the process of setting up and managing prepackaged server clusters on the EC2 service — making the raw Amazon.com technology much more accessible to non-technical users. Von Eicken actually went through the process of launching a cluster live on stage during the keynote. A typical cluster includes a web server with front-end load-balancing and a mySQL master-slave configuration that provides for redundant failover and has persistent backup to Amazon’s S3 storage service. The service will automatically deploy new instances in response to preset triggers such as spikes in traffic or CPU utilization.
RightScale says its service obviates the need to take on extra staff to run a website. “The technical skills to start a web-based company have really gone down,” Von Eicken told me in an interview the day before his keynote appearance. “A lot of startups don’t have a sysadmin, and they don’t want to have a sysadmin.”
With little promotion to date, RightScale already has 2500 users of its free developer edition and twenty paying customers, including Read the rest of this entry »
Phil Wainewright is a commentator and strategist on emerging software industry trends. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Software as Services via Email alerts or RSS.
SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- VMware Infrastructure: A Guide to Bottom-Line Benefits VMware Frustrated by the costs of maintain ever larger data centers?or building ... Download Now
- Three Steps You Need to Know to Stop Data Loss Varonis Sensitive data exposed to misuse or loss... it is the stuff of nightmares ... Download Now
- Email Security and Archiving - Clearer in the Cloud Google The time is NOW for businesses and organizations of all sizes to implement ... Download Now
Recent Entries
- Taming the Chatter cloud
- Can the Economist entirely be trusted?
- Microsoft cuts BPOS price to squeeze Lotus
- Cloud cuts everyone’s cost of ownership
- Box.net wants to be the Switzerland of data
Blogs From Our Sponsors
Most Popular Posts
- Can the Economist entirely be trusted?
- Microsoft cuts BPOS price to squeeze Lotus
- Cloud cuts everyone's cost of ownership
Top Rated
Premier Vendor Content Whitepapers, webcasts & resources from our Power Center Sponsors
- The best support in the Linux business
-
If Linux is going to power your mission-critical applications, you'd better have the best support known to business. Novell was rated the top provider of Linux technical support.
- Learn more >>
- Learn more about tools to grow your business
-
The Business Essentials Guide provides you useful tools and templates to help grow your business and save you time with automated shipping solutions.
- Save time with the UPS Business Essentials Guide
- The more you simplify, the more you save
-
When you transition from your existing Red Hat environment to SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell, you can recognize dramatic cost savings, perhaps as much 50%
- Learn more >>
- Keep Up With The Latest In Document Management with The DocuMentor.
-
Doc delivers the scoop on today's enterprise content management, printer maintenance, and all other issues related to document management. It's the DocuMentor Blog.
- Learn more >>
Archives
ZDNet Blogs
- All About Microsoft
- The Apple Core
- Between the Lines
- BriefingsDirect
- Collaboration 2.0
- Dev Connection
- Digital Cameras & Camcorders
- Ed Bott's Microsoft Report
- Emerging Tech
- Enterprise Web 2.0
- Forrester Research
- Googling Google
- GreenTech Pastures
- Hardware 2.0
- Home Theater
- iGeneration
- Irregular Enterprise
- IT Project Failures
- Laptops & Desktops
- Lawgarithms
- Linux and Open Source
- Managing L'unix
- The Mobile Gadgeteer
- On Sustainability
- Rational Rants
- The Semantic Web
- Service Oriented
- Smartphones and Cell Phones
- Social Business
- Social CRM: The Conversation
- Software & Services Safari
- Software as Services
- Storage Bits
- Team Think
- Tech Broiler
- Technology and the Global Supply Chain
- Tom Foremski: IMHO
- The ToyBox
- Virtually Speaking
- The Web Life
- ZDNet Education
- ZDNet Government
- ZDNet Healthcare
- Zero Day
White Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- The True Costs of Virtual Server Solutions VMware In an economic environment that is repeatedly heralding the message "do ... Download Now
- Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Iinfrastructure VMware VMware virtualization software has been adopted by over 120,000 enterprise ... Download Now
- Three Steps You Need to Know to Stop Data Loss Varonis Sensitive data exposed to misuse or loss... it is the stuff of nightmares ... Download Now
-
-
Smart Tech
Expert advice on innovations in healthcare and the green technologies that make it happen.
Find out more
-
Smart Business
Discussion and advice on management issues that revolve around making your world smarter and more useful.
More Smart Advice
-
Smart People
The best and worst moves in the management and strategy trenches.
Learn More
