Not all apps are meant for the cloud

Phil Wainewright of ZDNet today has a nice article that speaks of "7 things to learn from the Amazon outage". One of the key points he makes is that this should be a clarion call for enterprises to revisit their strategy of what applications of theirs should be deployed on the cloud. 

If you had put something on the cloud, it is implicit that you are assuming that you do not retain full control. A failure is one of the many things that can go wrong with possibly nothing in your power to set things right on the cloud. 

A colleague of mine was narrating another incident wherein a medical application was on the EC2 cloud and it got affected due to the outage. The owner in question raised tickets with AWS folks - No response. They then out of sheer desperation posted their complaint on the AWS forum. Instead of help, what they got were dollops of advice from other people on the forum questioning their strategy of deploying a mission critical medical application on the cloud !!!

I am narrating this here in the light of how mere cost savings and on-demand availability cannot be justifications to embrace cloud. Yet another article elsewhere highlighting the fact that most cloud providers aim to provide discrete services with as little support as possible chiefly because they are operating under razor thin margins. Volumes count and not individual attention to customers.

Remember cloud is not the panacea for all your infrastructure woes :-)

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AWS Disruption - Cloud Concerns Re-debated

In August of 2006, Amazon launched EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud - a service that allowed for the first realization of the 4 tenets of cloud computing at the Infrastructure layer. - On demand elastic compute power was available on a pay per usage model. Developers and Enterprises could host applications by themselves and also program them to take advantage of the underlying infrastructure that could scale up and down with a call to exposed APIs by Amazon. 

Architected, designed and rolled out from CapeTown, South Africa, 5 years ago, AWS ran into its first major battle this week with a major disruption at a datacenter in Northern Virginia. 

1. With major customers like NASDAQ, NetFlix, FourSquare, Pfizer, NewYorkTimes, this disruption brings to the forefront the debate on what should enterprises keep in house versus putting them on 3rd party provided infrastructure like AWS EC2. 
2. It also will result in enterprises revisiting their strategy on 3rd party infrastructure. Enterprises like NetFlix that hosted from multiple datacenter locations of AWS did not face disruptions while SMBs who opted for single data center hosting faced the brunt.
3. A definitive 3rd angle to be discussed would be on "Should we go with one provider or distribute our bets with multiple?

Occurrences of this nature do help both consumers and providers a chance to tighten their belts. A bane in the short term but a boon in the long term.

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IT Needs Then and Cloud Needs Now....

When the digital computer age was ushered in way back in the 1960s, IBM ruled the roost with System/360, a large mainframe offering. Over a decade and half we saw the emergence of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) with PDP and VAX systems, Hewlett Packard with HP-2115, Data General with its Novas. Each company had its own proprietary hardware stack and languages they supported. While DEC supported UNIX which was in its infancy then, HP supported Fortran and Algol and IBM had its own proprietary mainframe language. 

Enterprise and consumer needs drove adoption of these different stack each of which were best suited for a particular segment. Over the next 2-3 decades, enterprises suddenly realized that the computer industry had left them with a spaghetti of systems none of which were inter operable or supported cross talk. And this after millions of dollars had been poured to procure these systems. The anguish was so pronounced that it drove some of the legacy providers to extinction while others had to learn to dance to survive. Louis Gerstner, the erstwhile CEO of IBM, in his book, "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?"  gives an account of IBM's historic turnaround between April 1993 and March 2002. Lou Gerstner led IBM from the brink of bankruptcy and mainframe obscurity back into the forefront of the technology business. He did so by reorienting the company's business to the demands of the time. One of the main cornerstones he lay was the establishment of IBM Global Services - a System Integration division whose main objective was to help enterprises stitch together the multitude of computer systems they had invested in and get them to co-work. Thus was born the huge SI industry that has seen the likes of IBM, Accenture, EDS, CapGemini and the Indian majors like TCS, Wipro, Infosys, HCL, Cognizant drive business.

The reason I cited a snippet from history is to demonstrate two things

1. To draw a comparison between the digital computing era and the cloud computing world as it is evolving
2. To give the reader an indication of how transformations in the industry happen over years and decades.

Cloud computing industry was a buzz word for most part of the first decade in the new millennium. The fag end of the decade saw the emergence of Amazon Web Services, Google Apps, Microsoft Azure, Go Grid, SalesForce's Force.com as some prime cloud players. We also see a lot of smaller players who serve niche needs like Service Mesh, Zuora, JamCracker, Ping Identity, etc who complement the bigger players. However, the biggest lacuna is the interoperability of clouds. Users choosing a cloud provider do not have a seamless path to migrate to another cloud.provider. What you see is a picture similar to the erstwhile era. A rising need felt by enterprise customers to ensure a fair degree of standards and interoperability between clouds. What that also means is the need for companies that would help enterprises achieve it. Whether this set of players would come from the the big league or from the small niche of players remains to be seen...What's your take on this matter?

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Privacy on the Clouds - Debatable still?

IT enterprise customers have been cringing on the privacy aspects of public clouds. However, pundits and cloud vendors have been shouting atop their voices on how the privacy aspects have been dealt with.

Privacy on the public cloud will face a litmus test with the current Wikileaks shock wave. Wikileaks reported hacking of its website ever since it has started flooding the media with disclosures. It claimed that a mass distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is preventing users from accessing the site.

Following that was the news item that Wikileaks was moving to Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud to host its website and data disclosures.The Inquirer reports that ever since Wikileaks reappeared on Amazon's EC2 cloud service, with visitors being re-directed to servers in Europe and the US.

Wiki Leaks moved from its private hosting to a public cloud. Given the circumstances, it could not afford to be on a DDOS attack for ever on its private cloud. At the same time, this move by Wikileaks is sure to raise eye-brows in the US government, A company publishing material that the US condemns and has publicly asked it to refrain from publishing is now hosted on the servers located in its own geography and under a well-known US Enterprise. It sure might be in the realms of US federal scrutiny under security acts but then what happens to all of Amazon's claims of data privacy on its clouds.

3 Cloud Computing Concerns that refuse to fade away

 Cloud Concerns abound, however we are seeing quite a few of them getting addressed over the last 2-3 years. Here lets explore 3 such concerns that refuse to go away

Security over the Public Cloud: Security has been a constant concern over the public cloud from several angles

• Data on shared storage infrastructure: How secure is my data on such a shared resource? How segregated is my data from my competition? Will plain encryption mechanisms be sufficient?
• Authentication and Authorization: How will authentication mechanism over the cloud work? Will the corporate authentication controls extend to cover public cloud? Or would public clouds maintain their own authentication directories that override the enterprise laid out identities?
• Data longevity and recovery: What if my cloud provider gets acquired? How would recovery of data work across geographies. Will recovering my data be governed by the rules laid out in the country where my data resides?

Seamlessly moving applications across hybrid clouds: Application movement across private and public clouds to take advantage of the infinite elasticity of public clouds is a problem not fully resolved yet. How would data access happen across the enterprise firewall? Will it throw open security loopholes for hackers to exploit? Companies like Rightscale have been tinkering on solutions that address this problem.

Risk & Compliance: Enterprises are accountable to their customers for the integrity of data. However when this data is pushed over public cloud - who assumes responsibility for data integrity? Would it be the onus of the cloud provider or joint ownership between the cloud provider and the enterprise? Definitive answers and workable models are being explored still.