cloud

When Hyperic launched CloudStatus.com, I think most people took a look and figured they would never need such a service. Then all of the sudden we saw multiple outages from Google and Amazon and CloudStatus.com became the best resource to figure out what was going on.

I asked Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic to provide some insight as to why the Cloud is as much of an operations as it is a deployment battle.

Guest post by Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic Operations is one of the key open issues that will define Cloud computing's future.

The separation of Cloud offerings around consumption of resources versus consumption of applications makes a lot of sense. Regardless of the use case, the idea that a business might choose the Cloud as a platform to build and consume applications because it inherently reduces or removes the operational burden is ridiculous.

The simple reason is that software, regardless of who is developing it, always fails. Those who refute that point haven't been around technology long enough or haven't paid attention to the fact that every single 'Cloud' has had outages recently.

Enterprise software consumers (the folks whose money most Cloud providers are looking to get) know better than to assume that any new platform (whether it's "the Cloud" or Linux or Java) is inherently management free. Because of this, I'm confident that until management technology (including everything from provisioning to monitoring) matures, the enterprise will still regard the Cloud as a place to do science experiments. … Read more

I've been very fortunate to get to spend some time with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, during my trip to Argentina. Mark and I spent the day skiing in Las Lenas, with some soft snow by the middle of the day and a lot of great conversation throughout the day.

One question we discussed at length: what is Mark's ambition for Ubuntu?

In trying to get at the answer to this question, InternetNews today asks: why doesn't Canonical work with SAP and Oracle to get them to support Ubuntu? But this sort of question doesn't get anywhere near Mark's ambition for Ubuntu. It doesn't anticipate the intersection of the web and the desktop.

The more I talk with Mark, the more I think he's a very, very smart person. He recognizes that Ubuntu needs to be more appealing on the desktop than the Mac to generate user adoption, but that's not really where his attention is focused, so far as I can tell. He's thinking bigger than desktop bits.

He's thinking of cloud-plus-desktop bits. And this, my friends, is why Mark may end up winning the "desktop" war.… Read more

There aren't yet many practical demonstrations of how you actually use cloud services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. To put my money where my mouth is, I coerced Kevin, my IT guy, into setting up and deploying one of our products on Amazon EC2.

Disclosure: Lest you think I am trying to shill, we obviously used our own software for this proof of concept. Mule Galaxy is a service-oriented architecture governance platform with built-in registry and repository. It's written in Java and is GPLv2 licensed.

We are using the EC2 instance of Galaxy for customer demo purposes and to prove out the cloud as a deployment option. Odds are most enterprises won't put their SOA governance in the cloud, though there is a strong likelihood that you will have assets that cross your corporate firewall.

The cloud is becoming a more and more realistic deployment option making software consumable in new and interesting ways.

Just how complicated is this cloud thing?

The Amazon toolset has come a long way since the beta launched. In fact, it took us less than an hour to provision a lightweight instance of Fedora 6, install a few missing utilities, set a couple of environment variables, and launch Galaxy.

Here are the basic steps, followed by the nitty-gritty details for each section: … Read more

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