cloud

One of the cloud-related items people ask me about is how or why they would want to go outside the enterprise. Besides the obvious points around scale and cost, the reasons are variable based on your existing infrastructure as well as your business processes.

Without getting into a semantics discussion, I divide the cloud into two buckets: 1. Consumption of Internet-based applications: e.g. Gmail or Salesforce.com 2. Consumption of Internet-based computing resources: e.g. Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine

Somewhere within these two buckets are a great many other things such as PaaS (platform as a service), … Read more

You probably already know that you can take that desktop computer you leave on all the time and use its spare computing power to look for extraterrestrial intelligence or a cure for cancer. Swell. But suppose you're not so much into saving the world? Suppose you want to just save your data? Or make a few bucks? Check out these three services that use your PC's storage and bandwidth to serve you--not the world.

Wuala. This is a cloud storage service that you can use to save files for backup or sharing. But on Wuala, the cloud is … Read more

Software-as-a-Service is so common it's actually boring at this point, but there are still only a few very large SaaS companies. As SaaS companies grow, both in market and technical scale, the need to refine and mature processes becomes more important.

We really have no idea how the Operations are done in the Cloud, with the exception that we have a bit of visibility into the uptime/downtime. We still lack even the most basic release management visibility and we have no idea how Cloud providers deal with service interruptions, or how they do upgrades.

For example, there were recent issues with VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2, in enterprise configurations where the hypervisor wouldn't power on after being turned off. What would have happened if an entire Cloud system was shut down at that moment? Would customers even have been aware?

One of the big issues that I wonder about is just how well versed the operations teams are as the systems need to scale up with a very high SLA level.

If you too have wondered what your typical SaaS company looks like (YTSC), check out this new post from Dani Shonrom. … Read more

This is the first full-scale loss of Cloud-based data loss that I've seen, but it's surely not the last.

Somewhere between the storage provider, the network infrastructure, the data center, and the abstraction software lays the blame for this mess. And the fact that every provider is blaming the other (Linkup, MediaMax, Nirvanix) adds to the fun.

Linkup CEO Steve Iverson says at least 55 percent of the data was safe. How much of the remaining 45 percent was saved is not clear, he says.

Overall, it appears that human error was responsible for the deletion of the … Read more

This was one of those rare events in the calendar: Google's Gmail went down for the count while Twitter, everyone's regular punching bag, was full of chatterers who couldn't stop blabbing about the outage.

As my colleague Dan Farber recently reminded everyone in these pages, sometimes it does rain on the cloud. That's just the nature of cloud computing, which is still in its relative infancy. Truth be told, considering the load being shouldered, I'm more surprised that systems aren't breaking more often than they do.

For more, check out the video interview I … Read more

It's not clear why anyone should be surprised that Gmail, Amazon.com's cloud services, Salesforce.com, MobileMe, or Netflix have periods of instability or downtime. These services are not promising five-nines of uptime, and they are dependent on complex code and a vast network "tubes," as the beleaguered Sen. Ted Stevens has said, to deliver bits to users. Services such as Twitter have set a new standard for unreliability, making the other cloud-based services look good in comparison despite their outages.

The much-ballyhooed cloud from which Web services emanate is inherently unstable and prone to odd … Read more

Wall Street gave a nod to cloud computing as San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace Hosting on Friday opened for trading on the New York Stock Exchange following its initial public offering Thursday.

However, its shares fell 20 percent in their first day of trading, which came as a disappointment for the first venture-backed company to go public in nearly five months, according to a MarketWatch report. Rackspace has received backing from Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners, according to MarketWatch.

The hosting company, which boasts 30,000 customers, is trading under the ticker symbol "RAX." It raised $187.5 … Read more

In what's being regarded as a total breach of professional ethics, three reporters from Global Security Mag were removed from the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Thursday after attempting to expose the username and passwords of two reporters in attendance, including a CNET News employee. The magazine was a co-sponsor of the event, but the three parties responsible were asked to leave and barred from all future events, including this weekend's DefCon. For more detail, see the accounts from CNET News' Elinor Mills and Robert Vamosi who are in Vegas now.

Why buy the Lordship when you can just choose the title from the drop-down? Also on the show today, Black Hat 2008 shatters our faith in all that is technology (just like it does every year), and we engage in a lively discussion about the relative crappiness of the applications on the App Store, as well as the moral ramifications of Apple being able to nuke those crappy applications remotely.

Times Online: 'Fakeproof' e-passport is cloned in minutes http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4467106.ece

Black Hat: DNS … Read more