Cloud Model 2014: Hybrid, Google, Brokerage, Startups and The Enterprise

I am OnDemand Predictions2013 has been incredibly eventful for the cloud industry, mostly for making itself an eminent presence in the mainstream IT market. Businesses of all sizes have made their ways to the cloud, confirming my 2013 predictions. Government agencies worldwide take the cloud seriously, as demonstrated by the CIA’s contract switch over to Amazon from IBM. AWS has proven its rapid pace of innovation and has introduced great leaders who have completely replaced the concept of sluggish IT servers with instances. While the market is still small, I believe it will take over the IT market sooner than some of us think. I am not alone in my forecast… another analyst predicted that AWS will become a $50B business in 2015, which means it will multiply 12 times its size from last year. So, have a look at my 2013 predictions and read on to see what 2014 has in store for the world of cloud computing. (more…)

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The Inevitable Cloud Outage: 5 Key Essentials to Safe Guard Your Application

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A while back, I was starting up an EC2 instance on the AWS cloud when it entered an endless restart loop. All the application deployment efforts we’d made (installation and service configuration) over two weeks just went down the drain. So we called support. The support rep redirected us to his team leader who simply told us that, as indicated in the SLA, we had to abide by the shared responsibility model and they were not liable for our loss.
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Secure Your Cloud Building Blocks: Overview and a Few Tips

AWS Cloud Security TipsThe cloud enables great agility and can reduce costs if used right. But does it also manage risk? In fact, the cloud contains the same traditional hosting risks as well as specific related risks to your production environment running on the cloud.
With IaaS dynamic environment you pay only for what you use enabling alignment with actual real-time demand. The cloud instance is a temporary resource that is created from a gold master image automatically and on demand. This basic cloud automation capability makes traditional patching redundant and fast provisioning extremely easy. It is an important consideration that changes some basic security deployment perceptions when moving from traditional infrastructure to the cloud.
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The Cloud in HP’s Cloud (Part 2): HP Discover, the Enterprise and AWS Cloud

imageLast month I attended HP Discover (disclosure: my participation was funded by Ivy World). The IT war already started however HP stands still not taking initiatives and real risks as true leaders should take. At the three-day conference I learned why some companies don’t last and why this IT giant is at a great risk of losing in this new era IT battle. This is a story of a lasting company that might have already lost.
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Cloud Security Management – Overview and Challenges

What’s your first priority cloud security concern ?
From an attacker’s perspective, cloud providers aggregate access to many victims’ data into a single point of entry. As the cloud environments become more and more popular, they will increasingly become the focus of attacks. Some organizations think that liability can be outsourced, but no, it cannot! This presentation will answer questions such as what are the key security challenges for new cloud comers. What are the options and how you can start with a safe cloud deployment?
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Amazon Outage: Is it a Story of a Conspiracy? – Chapter 2

In April 2011, when Amazon’s cloud s east region failed. I posted the first chapter of theAmazon Cloud Outage Conspiracy – it was already very clear that the cloud will fail again and here it is… Chapter 2

Let’s first try to understand Amazon’s explanation for this outage.

“At approximately 8:44PM PDT, there was a cable fault in the high voltage Utility power distribution system. Two Utility substations that feed the impacted Availability Zone went offline, causing the entire Availability Zone to fail over to generator power. All EC2 instances and EBS volumes successfully transferred to back-up generator power.”

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Amazon AWS is the Cloud (for now anyway)

Every day I talk, write and comment about the “Cloud”. Every time I mention the cloud I try to make sure that I add the name of the relevant cloud operator, “Rackspace Cloud, “MS Cloud” (Azure) or “HP Cloud”. Somehow all of these cloud titles don’t right to me – it seems the only title that really works for me is the “Amazon Cloud”. In this post, I will elaborate about the competition in the IaaS market and I will explain further why I think this is so.
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Amazon Outage: Is it a story of a conspiracy?

Last week my Twitter blinked massively by news magazines and cloud blogers that reported on the extraordinary news: “The cloud computing crashed”. Amazon AWS had suffered a major outage in its US East facility. This was the worst in cloud computing’s and Amazon’s history. This failure affected major sites such as Heroku, Reddit, Foursquare, Quora and many more well-known internet services hosted on EC2. From what I read, it seems that automated processes began replicating a large number of EBS volumes, which harmed EBS performance and availability across multiple availability zones in north Virginia region.

“..However badly they’ve been affected, providers have sung Amazon’s praises in recognition of how much it’s helped them run a powerful infrastructure at lower cost and effort.” Seven lessons to learn from Amazon’s outage (ZDNet SaaS Blog)

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5 Amazon AWS Cloud Deployment and Management Tools

Cloud-managementAdopting the cloud  must come with a management solution strategy. Cloud Management refers to all cloud environment aspects and their related tasks. Tasks include deploying, monitoring, analyzing and more. Many IT organizations today running to adopt the new disruptive cloud methodologies. Choosing to run a business on a cloud is a strategic decision, picking the right way to orchestrate your cloud resources should be an integral part of your cloud adoption strategy.
I asked Amazon support:

“I am looking for a tool that will let the ISV’s customers an option to enable an environment by themselves with a back office for its administrator to control the different customer accounts. For example for an e-learning environment that also includes rules such as the total hours enabled for a single formation/cluster that support a few hours class a day”.
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