
On Robustness And Resiliency – Part 1
When you talk about cloud computing with the enterprises and tell them how cloud requires a different approach to designing applications, I get the biggest pushback from them. Since most of the large enterprises are used to the idea that expensive and powerful hardware that seldom fails is the only way to build robustness into […]

Two Events That “Clouded” Our Thinking In 2011
2011 is long gone and I should have done this post last week. However, I still think it is relevant to highlight some changes in our thinking about the cloud that happened due to events in 2011. Whether many agree with me or not, I see 2011 as a year where cloud computing moved from […]

Cloud Outages: Design For Failure Or Enterprise Clouds?
Last weekend saw Lightning taking out datacenters associated with Amazon Cloud and Microsoft BPOS. It affected one Availability Zone (AZ) in AWS Europe. Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge has detailed information on the incident. Amazon said that lightning struck a transformer near its data center, causing an explosion and fire that knocked out utility […]

Designing For Failure: Some Key Facts
The AWS outage from last week brought the idea of “design for failure” into focus in many of the discussions around the cloud world. Looking back at the outage, it is pretty clear that only those apps that were designed for failure withstood the outage and the rest, especially the ones without even a DR […]