
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 […]

HP’s Cloud: The Giant Ship Lost its Way
HP stands still, not taking the initiatives and real risks expected of a true industry leader. At the Discover conference, I learned why some companies don’t last and why this IT giant is at risk of losing in this new era IT battle.

Hewlett Packard: a tale of many clouds
Hewlett Packard used its Discover event in Frankfurt last week to reassert the company’s cloud credentials. Public, private, hybrid; HP is painting pictures that encompass them all, whilst seeking to protect hardware revenues and reassure conservative executives at some of its largest and most profitable customers. But HP has been here before, making bold claims […]

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 […]

Cloud SLAs Are Dead?
Today Forrester Analyst Vanessa Alvarez made a tweet that got me thinking about the state of public cloud marketplace. Even though I have been hearing the same about SLAs from people I am talking to, this tweet by Vanessa confirms that it is a broader trend in the enterprise IT as they plot their move […]

Can We Take Availability Off Cloud Concerns List?
One of the concerns cited by people who believe in traditional ways of computing is the issue of service availability in the public clouds. For reasons known only to psychiatrists, they associate availability to the presence of the software inside their organizational boundaries. If we talk to enterprise users who use email system hosted on-premise, […]

Wikileaks & Amazon – and Why That Was Good for the Rest of Us.
In his post about Amazon & Wikileaks, Krishnan’s position was that Amazon kicking out Wikileaks without a fair legal due process was in fact damaging for those of us who are proponents of the (public) cloud. Krishnan and I were debating this issue last night over Twitter. I disagreed with Krishnan, so I wanted to […]

It’s Time for Social Service Level Agreements
My idea of SSLAs (social service level agreements) would take the concept of the SLA and just apply it to the social web but hopefully in a much simpler way. I’m not stuck on the term here and perhaps SSLA might not even be the best term for this, maybe Terms of Social Customer Engagement […]

The Lego Internet
Jessie Stay over at Staynalive brings up the idea of the Lego internet, where large companies are busy making widgets, API’s and other building blocks that designers and developers can leverage in their own applications. Jessie mentions that the Building Block internet might just be a way to visualize Web 3.0 which is not a […]

Google Had an Outage: Let's Not Blame Cloud Computing This Time
Every time Google has an outage the press immediately jumps on the idea that somehow cloud computing itself is to blame. This is a wrongheaded viewpoint, because it is not simply a cloud issue, it is a total systems issue, much like anything else that has to do with any computing, outages happen anywhere in […]

Will Government Alter The Cloud SLA Game?
One of the key parameters in the push to accelerate enterprise cloud adoption is the SLA (Service Level Agreements). It is an important requirement before enterprises can even think of jumping into the cloud. After a slow start, companies are coming out with SLAs for their services but it is still a messy affair with […]

One Swallow Doth Not a Summer Make
Before any wit comes up with any other suggestions for the meaning of the title of this post, the “swallow” in the above refers to the bird, Stelgidopteryx serripennis, and not the physiological movement, phagia. For one swallow does not make the summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short […]

Telcos and SaaS – An End to End SLA?
Recently The Unreasonablemen posted a critique of one of Krish’s posts. I’ll leave aside some of the more caustic comments he makes but focus on the thrust of what he said. To paraphrase the post, The UM is critical of those cloud computing commentators that seem to dismiss as a minor point the fact that […]
One Bad Experience Doesn't Tarnish the Entire Industry
I hate it when people use a discrete example to cast doubt over an entire industry.We see it every time Gmail has an outage. We see it every time there’s a Salesforce outage. It’s unhelpful and it’s just plain wrong. The latest example came this morning – commenting on the SageLive issues, Kevin White from […]

Zoho Announces Status Dashboard for All Services – You Can Use it, Too.
No service is a 100% available, and of course your SaaS provider’s outage always comes in the ‘worst time’, just when you have a deadline to meet… what really gets painful is when you have no information whatsoever on what just happened and how long the outage may be. Major providers like Salesforce.com and Amazon […]