Several popular websites and companies were impacted by the recent Amazon
cloud outage. It was quite surprising to see that so many of the companies
had no backup plans to restore their applications at an alternate location.
Just because we are using cloud doesn’t mean that we should forget all
the lessons we have learned over the years in managing IT risks. There are
several ways companies can mitigate their risk exposure due to these types of
outages. For example one of Kaavo’s customers runs their application
across Amazon and Rackspace cloud using Kaavo IMOD; a total outage by one
provider wouldn’t bring their application down, their virtual servers
at each cloud provider runs around fifty to sixty percent capacity. It is
not always advisable to split the application deployment across multiple
clouds, e.g. stateful or transactional applica... (more)
It is interesting to follow Oracle’s journey to the Cloud, starting in
2008 with Larry Ellison's rant about “What the hell is Cloud
Computing?” to Oracle’s effort to sell servers as “Cloud in
a Box” aka Exalogic Elastic Cloud in 2010. Finally with the last
week’s Oracle’s Infrastructure as a Service (aka Oracle Public
Cloud) announcement it seems like Oracle is finally getting what Cloud
Computing is all about and is getting serious about it. Infrastructure as a
Service layer is the key innovation on top of the virtualization laye... (more)
One of our customers wanted to establish a site to site connectivity between
their datacenter and public cloud (Amazon EC2) and then have a private
network within Amazon EC2 with their own custom IP addresses for their
servers in the cloud.
Basically the idea here is to augment the internal datacenter resources with
the resources in the public cloud securely so that the servers in the cloud
appear as if they are part of their own private corporate network. The idea
here is to isolate the servers used by the customer in the cloud from the
rest of the servers in the cloud using ... (more)
University of Berkley has published an excellent paper on cloud computing,
the argument regarding data security in the cloud is that encrypted data in
the cloud can be more secure than unencrypted data in the internal
datacenter. Almost nobody uses encryption in internal datacenters as they are
percieved as secure. Here is an excerpt from the study:
“We believe that there are no fundamental obstacles to making a
cloud-computing environment as secure as the vast majority of in-house IT
environments, and that many of the obstacles can be overcome immediately with
well understood ... (more)
After my earlier blog discussing the evolution of IT, I had several
discussions on the benefits and challenges of virtualization, private, and
public clouds. Following bar chart is an attempt to capture the benefits
and challenges of various phases of IT evolution from the days of having
dedicated physical servers for each application to the use of public cloud.
The chart is self explanatory, some key points to note are:
Going from virtualization to private cloud is basically a step to provide
self service capabilities to the application owners. It increases
flexibility and als... (more)
Jamal Mazhar is Founder & CEO of 
David Lucas
Cathy Lopez
Shaul Efraim
Terence Martin Breslin
Cory Marchand
David Hughes
James Carlini
John Iffert
Dan Stolts
Joe Zeto
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