The major Amazon Web Services outage that began this past Thursday morning was unlike anything before it.  Countless AWS customers, big and small, went down, many for days. Surprisingly, other biggies like Netflix, SmugMug, and Twilio had little or no disruption.  One hungers to know why…

Over the weekend, George Reese, a cloud expert and author (and CTO of cloud-management tools company enStratus), wrote a fascinating post on O’Reilly about what some would call a cloud disaster — entitling it, ironically enough, “The Cloud’s Shining Moment.” George has a unique perspective on the cloud, and a large following. His post got huge play, and that continues — so I decided to message him on Twitter and set up a coffee so I could interview him Monday morning. I was anxious for him to elaborate on his post and share more of his thoughts, now that the outage is (mostly) behind us. 

Click on the link below to hear the whole chat. What follows here are some snippets from that 30-minute conversation (it was recorded in a busy coffee shop, so there’s background noise, but you can hear us fine):

• Thursday at 3:00 am: “We knew something significant was going down.”
• What happened, who was affected, and why.
• What about SLAs? “They’re not an insurance policy, they’re a refund policy… SLAs are a joke.”
• The “Design for Failure” approach vs. traditional application architecture gives you “control over your own destiny.”
• Why the AWS outage was a shining moment: it’s about learning what you can do in the face of an event like this. “So many survived.”
• The “cloud haters” came out after the O’Reilly post. Flame wars erupted in the comments. George pre-empted what they thought was, ahem, their shining moment!
• In large corporations, the “Department of No” is the real problem.
• George guarantees that CIOs who say their companies are not in the cloud actually are, and just don’t know it. Many others realize the cloud “genie is out of the bottle,” and are now coming to his firm, to be their window into what’s really going on in the cloud.
• George’s company now makes it possible to do “cross-cloud” backup and disaster recovery. Not only can customers do automated DR, but automated DR testing, too.
• He says his company is at “the most important point” in its life and the evolution of the cloud. In the last six months, “enterprise has gotten it.” He noted that he’s never spoken to so many Fortune 100 companies as he has in the past week.

• Download or listen to my interview of George Reese, CTO of enStratus … (MP3)

Two other excellent blog posts we touched on that came out over the weekend:
• “How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse,” by Don MacAskill, Cofounder & Chief Geek
• “Seven lessons to learn from Amazon’s outage,” by Phil Wainewright, ZDnet

(Here’s more about my interview subject: George Reese has been delivering software as a service since 2003 when he founded Valtira, a suite of web-based marketing tools. Prior to Valtira, George held a variety of technology leadership roles with J. Walter Thompson, Carlson Marketing Group, and startups Ancept and Imaginet. George is the author of several O’Reilly books on Internet and enterprise technologies, including Java Database Best Practices and Managing and Using MySQL and the recently released Cloud Application Architectures. He has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.A. in Philosophy from Bates College in Lewiston, ME. Follow him on Twitter @georgereese.)

Full Disclosure: As mentioned during the recorded interview, the writer had a consulting relationship with enStratus in 2009.

George Reese on “The Cloud’s Shining Moment,” Four Days Later is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

ReliaCloud, the new service from Visi that offers small-to-medium-sized enterprises cloud computing servers and storage space, has announced a new partnership with enStratus, a national cloud management platform that delivers governance for enterprise applications in the cloud. As they state in their press release about the “2+2=12″ aspects of this alliance, “Together ReliaCloud and enStratus offer companies a seamless, manageable cloud computing service. The two organizations are also joining forces to sponsor 2010 CloudCamp events and an April 7, 2010, webinar to educate information technology professionals about the business advantages of using cloud computing.”

Right here in our backyard we have both a strong cloud computing server infrastructure player (and ReliaCloud will also soon be offering storage as well) and a world-class cloud server management offering (enStratus) that offers such powerful tools that they’re used on the Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure platforms.

ReliaCloud & enStratus Form Partnership is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

What a gorgeous spring week it was in Minnesota last week: clear, sunny, even sneaking into the ’70s.   The only “clouds” in sight were the proponents and would-be adopters of the latest, new hotness in enterprise computing.  Two events, on Wednesday and Saturday, attracted a wide array of these IT professionals, some 350 all told, who were hungry to learn more about… well, “the orange that’s the new pink,” as Larry Ellison would say. It was beyond impressive that so many people would give up being outdoors last week after the winter we’ve had in these parts!  Goes to show how deep our IT roots run in this state. Geeks are everywhere here and, doggone it, we’re proud of it!  We still have many old-school enterprise IT folks who remember the days of time-sharing on mainframes, and way more than our per-capita share of Fortune 500 headquarters in this state, all with huge (well, getting leaner) IT departments. But, along with all that, Minnesota has a seemingly endless supply of boot-strapped Internet and software startup developers — folks that are finding they love what cloud computing is doing for them.

So, it was an eclectic bunch that gathered at these two Minnesota cloud events, and I was there to take it all in….

The first was a panel at the MN High-Tech Association’s annual spring conference on Wednesday at the Minneapolis Convention Center. The conference drew some 850 attendees overall. The cloud panel, one of several breakout sessions, was billed as “Moving Into the Cloud – Drivers, Benefits, Reality.”  I had the pleasure of moderating this one, which featured the following panelists:

- George Reese, CTO and founder of enStratus, a developer of enterprise-grade tools for security and reliability in cloud infrastructures, and author a new book from O’Reilly, “Cloud Application Architectures.”
- Matt Googins, a solution architect at Carlson Marketing Worldwide who has responsibility for a portfolio of IT services and programs for several of the firms large, Fortune 500 clients
- Robert Metcalf, founder and CEO of Flyspy.com, a third-generation travel search engine that’s been in development for seven years. The service displays all your travel options in the next 60 days in a visual format and will be available in beta in the next month or two.

So, just who was in the crowded, standing-room-only audience of more than 200 in this breakout session? I was shocked when I asked for a show of hands and saw upwards of a third say they were with firms of 1000 or more employees. A similar number identified themselves as senior or C-level execs. About 15% were developers or other technologists.

Big Topic to Cover in 45 Minutes
I led the panel discussion around the normal topics: is cloud computing over-hyped (we opened with the Larry Ellison rant — quite timely, as it turned out), then jumped into what are the definitions, the panelists’ experience with app development and deployment, and the platform-as-a-service approach versus infrastructure-as-a-service. The panelists provided an overview of the industry-leading Amazon Web Services offerings. But we moved quickly into a discussion of the advantages and business benefits of cloud computing, which was what most were there to hear — focusing of course on the economic benefit of greatly reduced cap ex and the pay-as-you-go model.  A statement by Reese that the cloud computing juggernaut is coming more from the CFO’s office than the CIO’s may not have been what many in the audience wanted to hear.  Metcalf added later that we don’t have a Chief Water Office or Chief Electricity Officer, and that many of the duties of the CIO are bound to change in coming years. Googins, after several successful evaluations of cloud infrastructure for his large enterprise clients’ apps, said he was within days of presenting to his CIO his recommendations for significant transformation to cloud infrastructure, and was confident that would be approved. He cited one successful application, for Monsanto, that he’s had in the Amazon cloud for nine months at 100% uptime.

But it was Rob Metcalf who may have wowed the audience the most with his success story, calling himself “the poster boy for cloud computing,” and admitting it may be responsible for nothing less than saving his fledgling startup.  Flyspy is a highly complex app that processes more data in 12 hours than Orbitz does in all it queries in a month, so Metcalf knew it would require massive infrastructure. But cloud computing allowed him to lop-off no less than $150,00 from his cap ex budget, which went a long way toward helping him get funding.  He now has just minimal monthly costs to run his service. After about seven months of experience in the Amazon cloud, Metcalf was now touting what the new infrastructure model has meant for his startup. He spoke in glowing terms about his experience with Amazon’s EC2 service, and also the advantages of its Simple Queue Service (SQS) for his particular huge compute needs. He also is a big fan of management and monitoring tools for the cloud,  such as those from Reese’s firm, enStratus. Googins also will be using those tools in a production environment he said he’d be rolling out in about a week.

Audience questions focused on pricing transparency, speed of deployment, the big issue of dealing with culture of the corporate IT department in moving to the cloud, and the status of legal language in contracts used in the new model. On that latter question, Flyspy’s Metcalf said his firm spent months modifying the contracts his data providers normally use for firms that have physical data centers. He said whole sections had to be cut out, many pages, and lawyers don’t do that easily (whereas “they’ll add stuff all day long”).  He said it was a huge hassle for his firm, and darn-near sunk it. But all is now well.

Serious Geeks Ignore Sunny MN Saturday, Talk Cloud Inside
You could tell those who gathered at CloudCampMSP on April 18 at the U of MN’s computer science building were serious. It was the Twin Cities’ first real spring Saturday, and there were tons of things we all could’ve been doing outside.  Being a free event, the less-dedicated of course didn’t show.  But that was a good thing, because the more than 100 who did pretty much filled the schmoozing space and the main room, anyway, and there was a ton of energy in that building.  We first heard lightning talks from local firm Visi.com, then Aserver, enStratus (also local), Microsoft (a local .Net architect) , Slicehost/Rackspace, and Rightscale — so, three of  those came to town just for this event.  Following was a lightning panel featuring three of the above, along with myself and a developer of some new cloud apps for Best Buy (Curtis Thompson), a proponent of PaaS (Google App Engine).  Audience participation was lively, prompting discussions of PaaS vs. IaaS, how businesses have to do more with less today, private vs. public clouds, bandwidth (esp in rural areas), nonprofits’ use of the cloud, and more.  Breakout sessions addressed a number of hot topics (see photo). I attended one on cloud mobility (led by Uri Budnik of Rightscale, all the way from LA), and another on security/reliability/regulation/compliance, led by Jim Hanlon, chief architect at Digital River (DRIV). I was impressed by the amount of intelligence in the room, in both sessions. Highly experienced, senior architects, some from huge firms — along with some pretty damn smart young guys, too, including startup founders (like Lukas Dickie of Gimigo).  Cool mix of cultures! 

In the mobility session, we talked about how we’re starting to hear of the promise of easily moving apps from one cloud to another (or data center to cloud), though Rightscale’s approach, I learned, is about moving servers from one to another; what they do is keep the server config consistent.  Later, in the security/compliance session, we talked about how compliance issues don’t change with the cloud; we still have the hard questions to ask. One big difference now: where is the server physically located?  And what about legal issues of, say, someone subpoenaing all the server records of a cloud provider when it has nothing to do with your company? (Witness the recent FBI example.)  We certainly don’t have all the answers. As Digital River’s Hanlon said, “This regulatory/compliance stuff is really hard, and that’s why companies want to outsource it” — citing it as a major reason they’re in business.

[For a further rundown on CloudCampMSP, go to search.twitter.com and enter "cloudcampmsp" or "ccmsp" -- both hashtags were used variously during the day, along with "cloudcomputingmsp" till I realized my mistake..   The event was one of the top trending topics on Twitter this sunny day in April, and a big success by all accounts. A ton more conversation transpired at a NE Minneapolis watering hole during the reception following...but, naturally, there weren't many tweets from there. And I know you'll thank me for not doing any of my podcast audio interviews while we were all drinking.]

It Was Cloud Week in Minneapolis, and All the Cool Kids (and Old Guys!) Were There is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Well, one local entrepreneur, George Reese, is right smack in the middle of all this buzz, and is in a position to help clear up a lot of the confusion about it — especially for enterprises looking to take advantage of the economic benefits of this form of computing.   His new book on the subject is scheduled to be released by O’Reilly on April 10.  It’s entitled “Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud.” (And here’s the Amazon link.)  George is a Minneapolis-based technologist and startup founder.  I’ve known him since late 2006 and thought it would be interesting to get his thoughts on this very hot topic, and hear the story behind his book.  This is an interview I conducted with George earlier this week, which first appeared on the cloud computing site Cloud Ave.

Graeme: How long have you been involved with cloud computing, and what made you decide to write this book?

George: I suppose that depends on what you mean when you say “cloud computing.” I’ve been developing SaaS [software as a service] systems for the past five years, but got into Amazon Web Services and Infrastructure as a Service in late 2007 when my company Valtira needed an alternate approach to a high-availability infrastructure. During this time, I’ve developed a body of experience in putting transactional database applications into the Amazon Cloud.  My editor at O’Reilly, with whom I’ve written several books in the past, heard I was doing cloud work and asked me to put together a book on the subject.

Graeme: Why is cloud computing gaining adoption like it is?  What is its attraction?  We know Internet and IT startups love it, but do you think it will catch on in any significant way with larger enterprises?

George: The primary attractions to cloud computing are cost and flexibility. Cloud computing enables you to build out a world-class IT infrastructure with no up-front capital investment and pay for the growth of your infrastructure as the business it is supporting grows.

I believe enterprise IT has a strong need for the benefits of cloud computing, but they have higher expectations with respect to reliability and scalability than startups. My company enStratus is all about dealing with these two concerns for enterprise IT, and I talk a lot about that in the book.

Graeme: For what types of readers did you primarily write the book? What will they get from it that they can’t get elsewhere?

George: The book is for people tasked with making the move into the cloud and guiding them through that move. I start by establishing what the cloud means from my perspective and what its value is to an organization. The book covers how you evaluate what makes sense to move into the cloud and, once the decision is made, the security, availability, and disaster recovery planning necessary to operate at an enterprise level in the cloud.

Graeme: Do you deal in the book with the issue of choosing a cloud computing provider?  In not, why not?  Do you attempt to compare providers?

George: No. Anything I might say in the way of a comparison would be out of date by the time the book hit the shelves. Jeff Barr from Amazon reviewed the book for technical accuracy, and E.J. Johnson from Rackspace and Randy Bias from GoGrid both provided appendices describing their offerings.

Graeme: What are some of the other key issues you deal with in the book, such as security and reliability of the cloud?  And what does the book deliver that’s not available elsewhere?

George: Given my role at enStratus, cloud security and reliability are obviously key concerns of mine. I spend an entire chapter on security issues and cover how to architect your applications for maximum availability throughout the book. I have not seen much of this kind of talk available on the Internet; mostly warnings about how security and availability are things you should worry about.

Graeme: Readers of the book will also learn about the management tools you have developed for use in your own company, Valtira, which offers a SaaS marketing platform. Please tell us how those tools led to the formation of a separate, spinoff company.

George: Valtira was looking to build out a new service offering that required a high-availability infrastructure. We priced out a managed services infrastructure to support our needs, but that proved too costly for a new product offering. We then turned to the Amazon cloud to see if it would meet our needs. We ran into a number of obstacles along the way. Some of these obstacles have since been addressed by Amazon through new service offerings like Elastic Block Storage. For other obstacles, we built out tools to take care of things. It turns out that people who were not Valtira customers really wanted our tools, so we spun them out into enStratus.

Graeme: You began working on the book many months ago. The release of the book seems now to be right at a time of intense focus on cloud computing, undoubtedly driven in part by current economic conditions.  What’s your take on all the hype?

George: Cloud computing is the most disruptive technology to hit business since the Web. It’s not hype. Like any disruptive technology, however, there’s a lot of misinformation flying around. To make matters worse, every person has a different internal definition of “the cloud” that frames their discussions on the subject. So, the hype is warranted, but everyone needs to pay particular attention to context and definitions in their discussions.

Graeme: With the book’s release, your speaking schedule is naturally heating up.  Please tell us where people can find you in coming weeks and months.

George: Well, first, I’ll be presenting at CloudCamp in New York City on April 1. Following that, O’Reilly has a webcast scheduled for April 8 on “Getting Started with Amazon Web Services.” In Minneapolis, I’ll be speaking at the Minnesota High Tech Association’s spring conference on April 15, and then at CloudCamp Minneapolis/St. Paul on April 18 at the U of MN.  Recently, my company enStratus was chosen as a presenting startup at the Under the Radar conference in Mountain View, CA, on April 24.  The following month, I’ll be speaking on the topic of information privacy and security in the cloud at the Glue Conference in Denver on May 12. Then it’s off to London, where I’ll be speak on May 15 at WebTech Exchange 2009 on the topic of hardening an EC2 infrastructure.

Graeme: That definitely qualifies as a whirlwind, George! Thanks for taking some time to tell us about your book, and I look forward to seeing you at some of these upcoming events.

(Disclosure: the author has a consulting relationship with George Reese’s company enStratus.)

What’s All This About ‘Moving to the Cloud’? One Minnesota Entrepreneur Can Tell You How is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.