Tag: AWS
Newvem Offers Advice to AWS Users In Midst of Major Outage
7th July
Well, it turns out the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage I referred to in my previous blog entry was more significant than originally reported.
The initial issues being suffered by AWS last Friday were compounded by the severe weather which hit the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states later that day. The impact of the outage has also been more widespread than just a small number of Cloud companies, as indicated by this New York Times article which discusses the broader effects on a diverse cross-section of companies and consumers.
The outage also came shortly after Gartner announced that it expects Cloud storage services to experience exponential growth over the next 3-4 years,
“The desire to share content and to access it on multiple devices will motivate consumers to start storing a third of their digital content in the cloud by 2016, [up from] just … Read More »
Measuring the Costs and Mitigating the Risks of Cloud Downtime
29th June
Today’s brief disruption of Amazon Web Services (AWS) coming on the heels of last week’s longer outage may have been minor in comparison to the extended problems which occurred last year, but they will still spark a new round of debate regarding the reliability of Cloud services and relative costs of downtime. These issues will also bring renewed attention to preventive measures IT folks can take to handle Cloud service disruptions of any scale.
By coincidence, around the same time that AWS suffered its outage, the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR) released its first Availability Ranking of World Cloud Computing (ARWC) report which stated that,
“The average unavailability of Cloud services is estimated to 10 hours per year or more. Average availability is estimated to 99.9% or less.”
The IWGCR’s estimation method relies on public press reports of Cloud incidents. … Read More »
Cloud Channels Coming Into Focus
23rd September
The topic of building effective channel alliances in the Cloud continues to gain greater attention. This past week, I spoke at two events and attended a third in the Boston area in which Cloud channel strategies and solutions were a central theme.
The first event was a local gathering called, “Mondays in the Cloud”, organized by Sonian and hosted at the UMass-Boston Venture Development Center. The session was kicked off by Greg Arnette, Sonian’s Founder and CTO, who provided his perspective on the state of the Cloud marketplace. I followed Greg with a talk about the Cloud industry trends driving the demand for a stronger channel network to build on the initial success of Cloud services. My talk was followed by Erik Sebesta of cloudTP who talked about how Cloud integration services companies like his are becoming an important channel to market for Cloud vendors seeking to sell private … Read More »
Parallels Pushes Partners Toward the Clouds
25th February
The extraordinary success of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions has prompted nearly every major hardware and software vendor to offer their own IaaS, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions as well. This has put tremendous pressure on traditional hosting companies, communications service providers (CSPs), and Value-Added Resellers (VARs) to respond with their own offerings in this increasingly competitive marketplace.
This week, I had the opportunity to participate in a full-day analyst briefing and attend the kickoff session of Parallels’ 2011 Partner Summit. [Disclosure: Parallels paid my travel expenses to attend the event.] This year’s Summit built on the momentum of last year’s conference by unveiling numerous enhancements to its portfolio of Cloud enablement solutions, including:
Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure
Hosted PBX
Microsoft System Center Hyper-V Cloud
Microsoft Office 365 Syndication
Parallels also promised to make an increased investment in its Application Packaging Standardization (APS) Program to permit greater portability of Cloud services.
What I especially liked about this year’s … Read More »
Amazon and Verizon Scatter Clouds
23rd October
Two announcements on the same day this week vividly illustrated the scalability and ubiquity of today’s Cloud Computing phenomenon. They also showed the diversity of users seeking to take advantage of Cloud Computing services.
The first was Amazon’s announcement that it is offering a free usage tier of its Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer services for new users for a full year.
Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) innovative and groundbreaking approach to packaging, pricing and delivering computing power has been the primary impetus and standard bearer of the Cloud Computing movement. Its commodity and even spot-pricing techniques have captured the attention of entrepreneurs and enterprises alike.
UBS Securities estimates that Amazon will generate $500 million in 2010 and $750 million in 2011, making it the largest Cloud vendor by far with minimal marketing effort. Yet, this still only … Read More »
Amazon Validates Private Clouds
26th August
One of the most controversial aspects of the rapidly evolving cloud computing market among industry insiders is the idea of ‘private clouds’.
Purists insist that cloud computing is all about exchanging legacy, on-premise, inhouse IT resources and functions with online, shared resources via the Internet (i.e., the ‘cloud’).
While this is the origin of the cloud computing concept, a variety of forces have conspired to create an alternative approach referred to as ‘private clouds’.
These include valid customer concerns regarding privacy, security, reliability and performance; along with proprietary concerns among various hardware and software vendors seeking to usurp some of the spotlight away from cloud upstarts like Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com.
In addition to the sourcing and marketing forces fueling the idea of private clouds, there are various debates regarding the technical implementation of private clouds which have raised questions about the viability of this idea.
Just as it … Read More »
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