High Availability of Your Cloud Expectations

Cloud SLAThe Cloud Service Level Agreement (SLA) discussion puts penalties and compensations on the table. Can we say that the compensation method the customer expects is the same as the Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor’s SLA provides?

A while ago, I experienced issues while starting up a specific instance on Amazon AWS cloud. I’m still not sure why, but the instance entered an endless restart loop. All the application deployment work (installation and configuration of a service) we did on it for about two weeks just went down the drain. Discussion with the Amazon AWS support team ended with an escalation of the support request to their head of support.

Take a look at the following paragraphs copied from the Amazon AWS EC2 SLA –

(more…)

Continue ReadingHigh Availability of Your Cloud Expectations

My View on CloudConnect 2012

cloud-connectLast week I attended one of the most popular cloud technology conferences in the world – CloudConnect. The CloudConnect conference started about four years ago. Attending the event gave me a clear understanding of the market maturity and evolution rhythm. Check out the following sections for the main points on what I heard and learned:

Cloud Performance

The underlying infrastructure performance, round trip time, bandwidth, caching and rendering are to be counted as the major features of an online service performance. In an interesting presentation by @joeweinman (known by his famous “Cloudonomics” theory), it was claimed that latency holds the greatest weight among these faetures. I encourage you to check out his new research – As Time Goes By: The Law of Cloud Response Time presents some good formulas, methods and considerations with regards to online services’ performance and latency (including simple facts, for example, that people tend to prefer selecting from fewer options on an online page –  so you can have less content on a page and achieve a better browsing performance).

(more…)

Continue ReadingMy View on CloudConnect 2012

Your Cloud Management Team: Ops, DevOps or NoOps ?

devopsAccording to Gartner’s report “Reimagining IT: The 2011 CIO Agenda”, almost half of all CIOs expect to adopt cloud technologies within the next five years. Not surprisingly Gartner’s analysts expect an extreme increase from 3% to 43% of the IT organizations that will run applications in the cloud. No doubt that most of the IT organizations already adopted SaaS, IaaS adoption is evolving rapidly and PaaS gain momentum.

 CIOs recognize that they need to reposition themselves and IT to support enterprise innovation and growth. However, two issues stand in their way: benefits realization (the achievement of business benefits) and IT skills. Skills are an issue because CIOs rely on bringing skills in from the outside whenever they need to get work done (see figure below). Both issues will prevent IT from reaching full potential unless the CIO addresses them
(more…)

Continue ReadingYour Cloud Management Team: Ops, DevOps or NoOps ?

The Rabbit and the Mole: the Web Developer and the Data Scientist

Source: Flicker

Six years ago I led Zarathustra as the company and product manager. We started this new company to help SMB companies to manage their sales, operations and accounting in one system. I was young and handsome but with not a lot of experience in regards to recruiting and employing web software developers.

It was obvious to us that we didn’t have enough capital to hire experienced developers and while searching for guys to help us with the R&D we realized that we could find great talented young geeks. These guys accumulated their experience by establishment of websites for their own purposes and habits such as movies, sports and dating sites. This always reminds me of the Facebook story which started with a super fast rabbit, Mr. Zuckerberg. At the start he actually created ”thefacebook” service using his own hands and keyboard spontaneously understanding the need to create a simple UI/UX, support operation scalability and demonstrate great value to the end user.
(more…)

Continue ReadingThe Rabbit and the Mole: the Web Developer and the Data Scientist

The Cloud in HP Cloud

Last week I was invited to the HP Tech Day in HP’s campus in Houston to learn and hear more about the giant’s cloud offering. I appreciate HP and Ivy very much for the invitation and for a great event where I was able to learn more and see these clouds in real. I had the privilege to meet savvy and professional guys. It is always great to see people who are enthusiastic on their jobs and are proud of their company. Let me share with you HP’s cloud from my point of view.
(more…)

Continue ReadingThe Cloud in HP Cloud