Evidence shows AWS is not perfect, Reddit reports outage due to AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is on fire being a leader in the industry and with companies like Netflix committing to AWS, they look like the perfect cloud computing environment to many.  For over a year I’ve heard of many though who are looking to move out of  AWS as they run into performance problems.

DataCenterKnowledge reports on the problems Reddit has had using AWS.

• Reddit Ties Outage to Amazon Performance

  March 18th, 2011 : Rich Miller

  UPDATE: Reddit has now updated its post from saying that it “been working to completely move Cassandra off EBS and onto local storage” to say that it is moving Cassandra “off of EBS and onto the local storage which is directly attached to the EC2 instances.” We have updated out post to reflect that Reddit has not reduced its use of AWS, but only the way it deploys resources on it.

  The social news siteReddit is revising how it uses Amazon’s cloud computing service following performance problems that contributed to six hours of downtime for the Reddit site this week. The Reddit operations team attributed the outages to problems with Postgres and Cassandra servers deployed on Elastic Block Storage (EBS), a service offered by Amazon Web Services. Reddit said EBS servers in a single U.S. availability zone for AWS experienced performance problems.

It will be interesting to watch as more stories become public of those who are moving out of AWS.  Where are companies moving to?  Many big players are going straight to wholesale space.  Some are going to Softlayer where they can get get dedicated hardware.  Keep in mind the hot start-ups like Reddit most of time have their code written to scale on multi-processor servers and utilize the hardware capabilities without virtualization.

If you don’t need virtualization why go to the cloud?

There is a good reason why Amazon doesn’t rent out dedicated hardware.  Do you know why?

4 letters for Cloud Computing - OSSM On-demand, Self-serving, Scalable, Measurable

What is the cloud computing?  How about 4 letters?  OSSM.

On-Demand

Self-Serving

Scalable

Measurable

I’ve been getting the scoop on cool stuff at SXSW from Silent Partner’s Kevin Francis and one of his conversations is with CloudCamp’s Dave Nielsen who has been explaining the cloud as OSSM (“awesome”)

Cloud Computing is OSSM ("Awesome")

Dave Nielsen of CloudCamp says the 4 essential characteristics of Cloud Computing are: On-demand (service is setup before customer asks for it), Self-service (customer decides when to turn on & off, Scalable (can handle increase and decreased usage) & Measurable (so you know how much you are using).

What is the opposite?

Get in line

Wait for service

Over provision to scale

Trust someone else to measure when convenient for them.

The opposite sounds like legacy IT.

OSSM works for me.  How about you?

Businessweek says Cloud Tech Titans are Amazon, Google, & Microsoft

Businessweek has a cover story on the cloud titans.

The Cloud: Battle of the Tech Titans

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are going up against traditional infrastructure makers like IBM and HP as businesses move their most important work to cloud computing, profoundly changing how companies buy computer technology

Fredrik Broden

By Ashlee Vance

THIS ISSUE

March 7, 2011

The Power of the Cloud

Amazon.com's (AMZN) squat Seattle headquarters looks nothing like the country club affairs found in Silicon Valley. There are no free soft drinks or volleyball courts. The light fixtures hanging from the ceiling in the reception area aren't fixtures at all but rather collections of extension cords fitted with bulbs. The receptionists lack computerized systems for registering guests. They simply write down visitors' names on a piece of paper. Such is low-margin life in online retail, where Wal-Mart (WMT) stands at the ready, waiting to take away your extension cords.

But is this really a cloud fight or the new battle in Information Technology?

"Things are downright Darwinian right now," says Mike Olson, the chief executive officer of Cloudera, a startup that specializes in data analytics software. "There hasn't been this type of Cambrian explosion in corporate technology in 20 years."

Is this the future?

Scott Raney, a partner at venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures, which has invested in numerous cloud-powered startups, views the recent acquisitions and outpouring of rhetoric as a signal that the big boys fully appreciate what's at stake. Still, he can foresee their numbers dwindling as great volumes of data are sucked up into the cloud. The disaster scenario for the traditional heavyweights is that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft end up as the corporate information kingpins.

"There is one school of thought that the world is heading toward three really big data centers owned by those three companies," says Raney. "They will be the world's computers, more or less, and all the software will be running there. It's a pretty extreme view, but that's spooking the hell out of all the other companies."

HP announces New Zealand Data Center with Carbon Emissions Reporting

HP announced a new green data center in New Zealand.

HP Announces Multimillion-dollar Next-generation Data Center in Waikato, New Zealand

Data center to help organizations simplify IT and invest more in innovation

AUCKLAND, New Zealand, March 9, 2011

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HP today announced a multimillion-dollar investment to build and lease a next-generation data center to be located in the Waikato district.

Part of the data center is a carbon emissions reporting service.

the HP Carbon Emissions Management Service, an assessment service that helps organizations calculate energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions emanating from the use of IT. This will assist organizations with compliance-based carbon footprint reporting.

The data center of course supports cloud computing.

The facility will provide the infrastructure organizations need for cloud computing services, application modernization and data center transformation, enabling clients to devote more resources to innovation and increase productivity.

“New Zealand has a vibrant economy which encourages technology innovation and environmental sustainability. HP’s energy-efficient data center in New Zealand, incorporating a high standard of design and capabilities, will support digital infrastructure growth and initiatives,” said Rasika Versleijen-Pradhan, senior IT services analyst, IDC New Zealand. “The facility will assist the New Zealand IT industry and provide a local platform for the provision of new high-tech infrastructure services to the region well into the future.”

Nimbula announces ship date for Cloud Operating System and partner ecosystem

Nimbula annouced it is ready to ship within 30 days.

Nimbula Announces General Availability of Cloud Operating System Software and Free Version

Santa Clara, CA – March 8, 2011 – Today at the Cloud Connect Conference, Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, announced that its flagship product, Nimbula Director, will be generally available within the next 30 days.

Based on Nimbula's Cloud Operating System technology, Nimbula Director delivers Amazon EC2-like services to both enterprises and service providers. Allowing customers to efficiently manage both on- and off-premises resources, Nimbula Director quickly and cost effectively transforms inflexible, inefficient and under-utilized data centers into powerful, easily configurable compute capacity while supporting controlled access to off-premise clouds.

And, they have launched a partner ecosystem with the following companies signed on.

Citrix Systems, Inc. is a leading provider of virtual computing solutions that help companies deliver IT as an on-demand service. Cloud Cruiser

Founded in 2010, Cloud Cruiser is a venture backed company that provides cost optimization solutions for the rapidly evolving enterprise cloud.

enStratus is a cloud infrastructure management solution for deploying and managing enterprise-class applications in public, private and hybrid clouds.

Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation and provides the Opscode SaaS Platform, a widely used hosted service for configuration management and infrastructure automation.

Puppet Labs develops and commercially supports Puppet, the leading open source platform for enterprise systems management. With millions of nodes under management and thousands of users, including Twitter, NYSE, Zynga, Genentech, Match.com, eBay, NYU, and Oracle, Puppet standardizes the way IT staff deploy and manage infrastructure in the enterprise and the cloud.

Scalr is an open source cloud management tool. It is focused on scalability for web applications, with hybrid clouds, mysql failover, automatic load balancing.

There are fundamentally two choices out there.  One go to one company for your cloud solution – VMware, IBM, HP, etc.  Or a best of breed approach for your environment.  Nimbula for those who want to design and engineer their cloud environments.

Now that Nimbula is close to ship, we’ll see who adopts this approach.