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 :-)

If you enjoyed reading this post, Subscribe to the feed here ...And never miss a post

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.

If you enjoyed reading this post, Subscribe to the feed here ...And never miss a post

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.