Tag Archive for 'cloud computing'

MobileMe and LiveMesh staffers go head to head…

Published by Ben Kepes on July 27, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0. 0 Comments

It’s fun being on the sidelines watching this one!

Steve Clayton from Microsoft was pretty chuffed to be able to blog about Apple’s MobileMe debacle. One could almost hear the glee in his words reporting that, for once something El Jobso touched didn’t turn to gold. He also got to take a broadside at the MobileMe "blog" (which he criticised for being one way with no comment functionality).

Commenters on Steve’s blog managed to get back though, pointing out both the fact of Hotmail’s outage earlier this year and the fact that this isn’t Apple’s first ever blog, and that yes there is the ability for users to question the MobileMe status.

Steve even got so excited as to tell the world that MobileMe engineer Thomas Han is following him on Twitter.

Oh how messy…

So here’s my take;

  • For Apple this is a class one cock-up. They’ve built a brand on excellent usability and reliability, And have excoriated Microsoft for their lack of same. The MobileMe rollout (regardless of the good reasons for the problems) has very much sullied Cupertino’s perfect(ish) record
  • Microsoft really shouldn’t be throwing glasses from within their stone house. Regardless of whether or not Mojave manages to convince the world that Vista is a good thing, no one within MS would deny that they haven’t had their share of problems over the years

More importantly than the name calling et al is the fact that this situation highlights once again the levelling that cloud computing is causing. When we see the likes of giants such as MS, Apple and the like have issues of the sort we’ve come to expect from Twitter, it’s a stark reminder that, as Steve puts it;

this cloud computing stuff is very, very hard – especially when you want to do it at scale and especially when you want to charge someone for it. Google do a great job with free services like GMail and we do pretty well too with Hotmail, Messenger and others. When the financial analysts asks why we’re sinking money in to online services and vast capital outlay in datacentres and their efficient operation, this is why

Of course he’s right – cloud computing takes a new level of resource, a new way of thinking and a new model of business. It’s by no way a given that the giants of yesteryear will do it right (but they’ll enjoy being nasty to each other in the attempt).

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Sometimes utilities go down…

Published by Ben Kepes on July 22, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, PaaS, SaaS and Strategy. 2 Comments

The blogosphere got in major panic this week when Amazon’s S3 online storage service went down for a number of hours. It seems there was around six hours of outage that had life threatening consequences – yes, worse than hospital power supplies being wiped out, worse than widespread transportation gridlock – the little avatars that Twitter users have to animate their identities did not show up!

Sacre bleu!

I mean people let’s get some balance here – sure online storage systems are becoming more and more important but I reiterate – they’re not generally a matter of life and death. SmugMug, an Amazon S3 user shows a sense of balance when they say;

Our faith in Amazon, and the care they take of your priceless memories, hasn’t been shaken. Your photos and videos are safe – which is our #1 concern. Since problems in this industry are inevitable, and Amazon’s performance over the last two years has been so exceptional, we’ve been afraid an outage like this. I’m sure there will be more over the next few years, too.

The important thing is that they’re few and far between, short, and handled properly. Every component SmugMug has ever used, whether it’s networking providers, datacenter providers, software, servers, storage, or even people, has let us down at one point or another.

Or pretty much "we do what we can but sometimes utilities go down – get over it".

We’ve heard for a few years about the move to utility computing – when storage and access will become just another utility like water and electricity – so we should treat it as such. In a former life I worked on emergency power supplies for critical business installations – generally they’ll have multiple levels of redundancy – backup feeds, UPS systems, generators and the like. How is it that when we move to a utility model of data storage we seem to think it acceptable to rely on (usually) a single pipe to a single box?

Phil posts with some sense about the requirement for multiple redundancies, Loic posts about choosing top shelf options that have better guarantees in place. Steve Clayton tries (not overly successfully) not to take a swipe at his employer’s competitor but makes some salient point about the changes that will happen in the coming move to the clouds;

  • some big names will lose along the way – or get eaten up
  • lawsuits will happen as SLA’s are promised and not met
  • the backlash as cloud computing goes over the hype curve is inevitable
  • a few small players will make big, big investments that are needed to make the cloud work

We live in times of disruption. By its very nature – disruption entails a degree of uncertainty and flux – cloud compute outages are an embodiment of this flux.

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Cloud computing and SaaS…

Published by Ben Kepes on July 16, 2008 in Design, IT and SaaS. 6 Comments

Jeff Kaplan tries to clarify where he sees the intersect of cloud computing and SaaS. His post is in response to many people using the two terms pretty much interchangeably. Jeff says that;

In my case, I view cloud computing as a broad array of web-based services aimed at allowing users to obtain a wide range of functional capabilities on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis that previously required tremendous hardware/software investments and professional skills to acquire. Cloud computing is the realization of the earlier ideals of utility computing without the technical complexities or complicated deployment worries. With this precept in mind, I see SaaS as a subset or segment of the cloud computing market.

One of Jeff’s commenter’s puts a more simple spin on it when he says that;

[the] primary difference between cloud and SaaS is who they serve. Cloud computing serves developers and companies who develop software and services. SaaS serves end users who use software.

So from this definition we see that SaaS is one consumer facing usage of cloud computing. While it’s something of a semantic discussion it is important for people inside to have an understanding of what it all means. Put simply cloud computing is the infrastructural paradigm shift that enables the ascension of SaaS.

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On the move to the clouds, an awesome post…

Published by Ben Kepes on July 11, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, PaaS, SaaS and Strategy. 0 Comments

Stacey Higginbotham wrote a provocative post that fired up a lot of people detailing 10 reasons why cloud computing won’t take of within enterprise. The post is great – but more importantly there are some exceptional responses from different players – both evangelists for and detractors of, cloud computing. The post and comments are well worth a read but briefly, Stacey’s 10 reasons are;

  1. Security
  2. Lack of an ability to datalog
  3. Generally based on a specific platform
  4. Reliability issues vs in-house data centre
  5. Portability issues (data accessibility and file formats)
  6. Environmental concerns
  7. Jurisdictional issues with remote and offshore hosting
  8. Issues around the speed of access with cloud based data
  9. The fact that large enterprises already have their own “clouds” within the firewall
  10. Bureaucracy issues – the conservatism of enterprise decision makers

All in all (and putting aside for a moment what your thoughts are about the post itself) this sort of discussion is what makes blogging such a powerful medium. It’s fast, harnesses the collective knowledge of some very clued up people, and is unconstrained by any one vested interest.

Read it and rejoice!

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A bandwidth tailored cloud…

Published by Ben Kepes on June 4, 2008 in Design, IT, SaaS and Society. 0 Comments

Many have written about the barriers to true adoption of a cloud-based world. The biggest barrier is the lack of bandwidth and connectivity in various parts of the globe.

It was great then to read Bill Gates’ thoughts about a diverse range of cloud based offerings, dependent on the capacity of the local networks. Gates said;

…if you look at the really utilitarian uses of the Internet, a lot of those can be done at fairly low bandwidth, even with a cell phone in a rural village in say Africa or India looking at the crop prices or your health records or getting advice and things like that. So, we will have to start to think of the Internet as including parts that are not super high bandwidth and adopting applications for that, and then another part which is more in the rich-world urban type area where you can assume [the availability] of very high bandwidth.

Of course this discussion pre-supposes some degree of connectivity, but if you take the leap for a moment of considering that a fait accompli, then Gates’ vision of a range of capacity differentiated services makes lots of sense – and for that matter so does Microsoft’s entire software + services strategy.

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