Every Friday we like to highlight some of our favorite posts on Cloud Computing, service orientated infrastructure, Devops, and anything else that grabbed our attention over the week. Here are seven great articles from the week of April 18th that are worth taking a look at. Enjoy!
There is money to be made, but somewhere along the way you have to charge for the service and you need to provide good value for that service. Since “cloud” adoption is still just that–being adopted–you have to be willing to “think big, start small and by all means keep it moving.”
What concerns me, however, is when vendors tout cloud applications (also known as software as aservice, or SaaS) that aren’t real cloud applications. Real cloud applications deliver incredible benefits, but only if they were designed to be cloud applications, and are delivered in a true cloud model.
Cloud computing customers will want to investigate open-source cloud software for the same reason they are eager to have cloud- interoperability standards developed -- to help them avoid being locked in to a single cloud vendor and to make it easier to integrate apps, virtual machines or other elements from external clouds or those of its business partners, says James Staten, vice president and principle analyst at Forrester.
Anyone who thinks the cloud era of computing is not a paradigm shift is not paying attention. The benefits of instant, low-cost computing are everywhere. New companies are starting at a record clip, creating new products, services and jobs. Science and business are harnessing computing like never before. And our mobile world is being powered by more and more robust services, driving both consumer delight and business efficiency. It is a whole new ballgame — and it’s just getting started.
This morning, multiple availability zones failed in the us-east region. AWS broke their promises on the failure scenarios for Availability Zones. It means that AWS have a common single point of failure (assuming it wasn't a winning-the-lottery-while-being-hit-by-a-meteor-odds coincidence). The sites that are down were correctly designing to the 'contract'; the problem is that AWS didn't follow their own specifications. Whether that happened through incompetence or dishonesty or something a lot more forgivable entirely, we simply don't know at this point.
Accenture and the LSE surveyed more than 1,035 business and IT executives and conducted more than 35 interviews with cloud providers, system integrators, and cloud service users. The key finding: There's a gap between business and IT. Businesspeople see the excitement and business benefits of cloud computing, so they're pushing for it. However, IT people see cloud computing as causing issues with security and lock-in, so they're pushing back.
Fast virtualization saves money To maintain its 11 data centers, the NYC HHC had a fairly painful upgrade cycle. Every year, the corporation had to replace hundreds of servers and supporting hardware. By quickly virtualizing their servers and reducing the number of data centers, NYC HHC saved about $8 million by avoiding those upgrade costs.
