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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ClickSoftware – Great Case of an AWS Cloud Adoption: Part 1, Operations

imageOver the last year I had endless conversations with companies that strive to adopt the cloud – specifically the Amazon cloud. Of those I met, I can say that ClickSoftware is one of the leading traditional ISVs that managed to adopt the cloud. The Amazon cloud is with no doubt the most advanced cloud computing facility, leading the market. In my previous job I was involved in the ClickSoftware cloud initiative, from decision making with regards to Amazon cloud all the way to taking the initial steps to educate and support the company’s different parties in providing an On-Demand SaaS offering.
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The Cloud Security Part 1: For Dummies

cloud security considerationsFrom 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, and I hope that we all understand it cannot. The contract with your cloud vendors basically means nothing, the ISVs or should I say the `SaaS providers`  still holds the responsibility, so rather than focusing on contracts and limiting liability in cloud services deals, you should focus on controls and auditability.

“Dropbox, … deceived users about the security ..The FTC complaint charges Dropbox with telling users that their files were totally encrypted” Wired Magazine

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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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