The Inevitable Outage of the Cloud

Cloud Disaster Recovery DilbertTraditionally delivering high availability often meant replicating everything. However, today with the option of going to the cloud we can say that providing two of everything is costly. High availability should be planned and achieved at several different levels: including the software, the data center and the geographic redundancy. According to a recent study the cost of a data center outage ranges from a minimum cost of $38,969 to a maximum of $1,017,746 per organization, with an overall average cost of $505,502 per incident.

1 – Total cost of partial and complete outages can be a significant expense for organizations.

2 – Total cost of outages is systematically related to the duration of the outage.

3 – Total cost of outages is systematically related to the size of the data center

4 – Certain causes of the outage are more expensive than others.  Specifically, IT equipment failure is the most expensive root cause.  Accidental/human error is least expensive.

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Private Cloud Interview with Mr. Joe Weinman


As the founder of Cloudonomics.com, Joe Weinman is one of the most known cloud computing evangelists in the world. Weinman researches the economics of the cloud. Among other cloud aspects he examines, he also relates to the cloud financial operational costs together with its buisness benefits. Following I Am OnDemand last posts summarizing and discussing several Cloudonomics researches, we asked Mr. Weinman to meet for a brief discussion. Last week I had the honor to interview him for about an hour and hear his clouds’ perceptions and vision.
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Developers are from Mars

The three layers of cloud computing IaaS, PaaS and SaaS occupy the headlines with significant capabilities undergo continuous improvement to host services in the cloud. This growing market is slowly changing so that offered services will become generic. The current evolving struggle is the deployment and management of SaaS applications in the cloud, Gartner calls this cloud market portion SEAP (Software Enabled Application Platforms). We will dare to say that developers are from Mars and cloud providers from Venus, let us explain in detail why.

SaaS application developer builds the application architecture structure including the database system, the business logic and the user Interface. The software developer (or the SaaS vendor for that matter) invests on building these main three infrastructure cornerstones in order to bring life to the business idea and launch a new on-line service.
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Hybrid Cloudonomics – Part 2


The first part of Weinman’s lecture discussing the basic “go to the cloud” and demonstrating cloud environments’ loads of different corporations’ web applications. In this part we will bring 6 scenarios presented by Weinman, each includes a brief analysis and proof of its cost and benefits.

First lets start with several assumptions and definitions:
> > > 5 Basic assumptions Pay-per-use capacity model:

  1. Paid on use – Paid for when used and not paid for when not used.
  2. No depend on time – The cost for such capacity is fixed. It does not depend on the time or use of the request.
  3. Fixed unit cost – The unit cost for on-demand or dedicated capacity does not depend on the quantity of resources requested (you don’t get discount for renting 100 rooms for the same time).
  4. No other costs – There are no additional relevant costs needed for the analysis.
  5. No delay – All demand served without any delay.

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Scale IT and Make Your Cloud Capacity Meets Demand

Capacity vs demandThe practice of shaping demand to fit the available resources can be found for example in transportation businesses, where airlines charges more for their service when demand is high and charge less to encourage more demand. In the real-time and interactive on-line world,  the challenge is to ensure that capacity meets demand.
The following diagram shows 3 cases of over capacity, under capacity and on demand capacity, which the latter can be achieved only by taking an advantage of the cloud elasticity.
IT systems or applications have capacity limitations. Sometimes a new SaaS web application works well in its first phase on the air as it serves from tens up to a maximum of several hundreds of users. In this stage, there will be no need to worry about a scalable hosting environment and paying a flat fee for the fixed computing resources makes sense. Over time as the SaaS product matures, the amount of users increases and the overall usage goes up. The SaaS vendor will have to deal with these scalability challenges and hopefully without the service suffering from poor performance. So what are the options to maintain the application’s availability with the new demands? Or in other word how do we scale it?
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6 Key Essentials for Hybrid Cloudonomics: a Lecture by Joe Weinman

Joe Weinman is well known in the cloud computing community as the founder of Cloudonomics. Presenting complex simulation tools, Weinman characterizes the sometimes counterintuitive business, financial, and user experience benefits of cloud computing including its on-demand, pay-per-use and other buisness aspects. Last month I had the pleasure of participating in Weinman’s webinar. Weinman discussed several interesting points which I would like to share with you.

Weinman started by contradicting what seem to be the fundamental assumptions regarding the Cloud and its benefits. There was nothing radical about what I heard but it made me think and challenge all the things I took for granted –
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