February 20th 2011 will be a date that cloud commentators, cloud zealots & the opportunists in the cloud will make sure is not forgotten. Amazon AWS had a colossal outage. This article from the BBC exemplifies the kind of coverage that went along with the event. Needless to say, alot of people directly affected as customers of AWS were miffed, as were users of those services hosted there in the affected area. And no, SkyNet did not begin its take-over starting with AWS for those who were concerned.
First off, one thing really needs clarifying about this event, as the reaction in social media circles, especially amongst twitterati was grossly out of of proportion. The reality of this is that a SINGLE region in Amazon's network was down. The rest of their services in the USA were fine, as were their European & their Asian services. The fact that the affected region services so many companies made the issue seem far greater than it was. Amazon AWS customers who engaged in deploying their cloud strategy across multiple regions in Amazon's EC2 system were completely unaffected.
The fact it went on for over ten hours yes is a concern. And rightfully so. But, did it violate Amazon AWS's 99.95% SLA which allows for '4 hours per year of downtime'? Nope. Not even in the slightest, even with their 10 hours of being unavailable to people who were screaming over lack of access to key services. But, screaming doesn't get around SLA's you agree to for services you take, or use. Always check the warranty.
And this is the real thing to remember; the fine print of your SLA's or terms & conditions of service are the last word in any comeback you have. Cloud Providers trying to win business from AWS to their own services around the world, especially in Ireland cried foul. What they neglected to tell those same Irish companies they were trying to win business from as a result of the outage was that their own SLA's & guarantees are in fact absolutely no better than Amazon's ones. In fact, some of them have in their terms & conditions that you have absolutely no comeback whatsoever in the event of an outage, & there are no guarantees on up-time at all, even at centre power/connectivity level, which some at least provide.
The companies who promote their uptime & their 'solid SLAs' if you dig into them are actually nothing more than guarantees against power & network connectivity to an actual hosting center itself, & unless both those fail for more than four hours in a year, you could lose access to your VPS or cloud for days on end due to a hardware, or virtualisation or internal networking issue & they would still not have violated their SLA with you.
Beware of service providers who are eager to bash the performance of their competitors openly. They'll mouth off quite happily about others lack of 'service', while at the same time not being so mouthy about what happens when (not a case of 'if' with technology, but 'when') their services fail on you. And believe me they will. If multi-billion dollar global companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple & others have outages, your local provider who is less equipped staff-wise, financially & technically to be as able to deal with outages as efficiently as those corporations who have vast resources in all areas. It is also important to remember a very old adage when it comes to this, empty vessels make the most noise.
So, you're a company looking to engage a cloud strategy because you can see the benefits, but are scared by what happened with Amazon AWS from what you read on blogs & Twitter. You don't know what to do next. Firstly, the most important thing to do is ignore Twitter & the blogs decrying AWS. These are but a noisy few out of millions. Many of them are vested interests & vested interests should be ignored like the plague.
A good cloud service provider will be upfront with you when you engage them. They should be knowledgable enough to work with you in understanding your requirements, explain what risks there are to what you want to achieve, & provide advice on how to mitigate against the risks to what you want to do. Sure they're there to sell you services & gain your custom, but a good consultant will tell you that they are & should only be part of a solution to you. That as good as the company they represent may be, risk should always be spread.
Every company involved in risk management as a business will tell you that the absolute fundamental to risk management is spreading that risk around in a controlled manner to shore up your mitigation. Mitigating risk is not cheap. So don't fall for companies promising you to be the 'cheapest solution for your business' - they're not. They are if anything given their pricing, a small part of a solution to you. You also need to ensure that you have a communications plan in place in the event of any outages, as well as documented & tested internal procedures on how your teams & staff need to act, & what events need to be triggered if any to mitigate the circumstances or ease them as much as possible.
But this issue goes outside your cloud provider. It comes down to your choice in developer also. Your developer if they are worth their salt should have an application that allows for spread, that allows for redundancy. They should also be advising you to spread your system across at least two providers or two centers at the very least if your single provider can actually do this. Your cloud provider really should even do this. Single cloud services are single points of failure.
And the issue of disaster recovery or planning doesn't even stop at the developer or the service provider. You, as the business owner/operator leading your organisation are the absolute linchpin of it all. Fundamentally, being a good leader means being a good planner. As a leader of yours, it is incumbent upon you to plan, & plan well & properly.
'The Cloud' is not a solution to redundancy, or disaster recovery. It is a tool to help mitigate some aspects of risk at best in a cost effective manner for its part. It should never be the case of "Oh, it's in the cloud, no need to worry or care. It's taken care of already by my cloud provider." Just because it's easy to set up a business in the internet space, doesn't mean normal conventions for business disaster recovery, or 'battle-stations' planning doesn't apply. The fundamentals of good business planning apply to the Internet as much as the high-street. Most of the time, it's just cheaper. Shortcuts on these areas are just that, except to one day being caught proverbially with your pants around your ankles.
Remember; a blip in the operation of your business from an outage won't kill your business, but how you manage that blip, communicate & work towards the point of restoration will determine whether your business will recover when it happens. Another couple of adages worth closing this blogpost with is 'plan for the worst, hope for the best', 'expect the unexpected' & 'if you want peace, prepare for war'.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Episode 3: The one where the the story of the cloud in Ireland was told
In the last four years, clouds in Ireland have represented three distinct things to the Irish people; our freakish & severe weather pattern changes wreaking havoc & causing hundreds of millions of euros in insurance claims, the dark clouds of national economic & personal depression from our financial issues, which have since placed Ireland at the centre of the world’s gaze, & the third kind being the latest buzzword in I.T., ‘Cloud Computing’, which coincidentally was heavily influenced by those aforementioned fiscal issues. Business costs being driven down were becoming part of the fight-for-survival, & traditional I.T services models or owning hardware was no longer part of the business plans for some companies, for who cloud was a solution turning traditional capital costs (CAPEX) into more economic, budgeted operational spend (OPEX).
The economic factors by their very existence and effect on Irish businesses has proven influential in the story of the cloud in Ireland, and its growth to Ireland becoming a ‘Global Cloud Computing Centre of Excellence’ according a report commissioned by Microsoft & the IDA (the Industrial Development Agency - who are responsible for the attraction and development of foreign investment in Ireland). [ link to report http://www.idaireland.com/
To firstly put some perspective on where the cloud in Ireland currently stands say against the USA, a recent comparison of cloud adoption rates between Ireland and the USA suggested that the IAAS aspect of cloud services (infrastructure as a service - for those not ‘down’ with the cool tech kids) is getting a far better adaptation rate in the USA than in Ireland, while SAAS (software as a service - think SalesForce, Apple iTunes’ Appstore etc.) had a better adoption rate in Ireland than IAAS. IAAS in Ireland still has some levels of mistrust, and as a result the cloud in Ireland to date has never really been driven by big business demands, or the major global players in the same way it has in the USA.
Cloud’s adoption in Ireland has traditionally been led by the development community, who when working on new web-based projects for small Irish start-ups had seen them place those projects live in the cloud, as shared hosting had proved itself unreliable despite being cheap, and that dedicated servers had become expensive, but again seen as unreliable in against ‘the cloud’.
The Irish development community, through its early use of Amazon’s web services, demanded cloud services in Ireland. The Irish hosting companies, who were either running out of space, available power and/or access to land to build data-centers (as the cost of land in Ireland went out of control - [ link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
The charge with providing cloud services in Ireland has been blazed by Irish hosting companies, and has since spawned a new breed of cloud-centric service providers who provide ‘cloud-only’ services, supplying best-in-class cloud services without the noose of aged legacy infrastructures and services to support. One such company is Dublin based Digital Mines, the brain-child of Ed Byrne. Byrne was part of the senior management team who early last year sold Hosting365, once one of the mainstays of the Irish shared hosting scene, to U.S disaster recovery company SunGard.
Digital Mines (www.DigitalMines.com), founded in 2010, recently shot into the news after closing €750,000 in first round funding via Enterprise Ireland and Delta Partners [ link: http://blog.digitalmines.com/
Digital Mines, as an example, set out on the path of innovating beyond the traditional euro-spend-sink of buying hardware, building a data-center and the whole traditional go-crazy capital investment infrastructure spend by instead leveraging off existing world-class leading infrastructure from Amazon’s AWS [ link: http://aws.amazon.com ]. Amazon’s lead in this area is best put in perspective by the fact each day they add the equivalent compute power & services to power Amazon.com in the year 2000, which then was a USD$2.8 billion business. It is hard to imagine there is anyone else globally implementing that much infrastructure for cloud on a daily basis, let alone in the Irish market.
Digital Mines’ team with overfour years experience of building out cloud services, combined with a similarily experienced cloud sales team, no legacy infrastructure or service issues, or capital investments, Digital Mines set about creating a best-in-class, business friendly management console that plugs into AWS, which operates from multiple, diverse cloud centres in Ireland, which are the centrepiece for Amazon’s European cloud strategy. Again, a demonstration of Ireland’s importance role in the European cloud story to date and for the future.
The recent Microsoft and IDA study in Ireland, which was conducted by Goodbody Economic Consultants, while highlighting and acknowledging the importance of the cloud for Ireland, failed to highlight the opportunities and the levels of innovation it has already spawned. It also failed to demonstrate the issues the market in Ireland faces to meet the potential it envisions and aspires to, which are concerns that could apply to the potential for the European market growth for cloud.
Many cloud companies in Ireland (and across the world) have learned along the way that the awareness of cloud computing among both business and technical users is quite high, but that they come at it from different perspectives. Most interesting is that while awareness of the cloud is high, the actual understanding of how to apply it within a business is not. As a result, most businesses have not taken advantage of cloud services to date. Obviously this is a huge opportunity with awareness and appetite being very high, but expertise and understanding lacking.
For example, IAAS cloud providers in the Irish market have in recent years tended to take a very hands-off, business unfriendly ‘we-provide-infrastructure-
One of the biggest complaints (and indeed criticisms) levelled at Irish cloud service providers by their customers, and even by those in the market space as potential adopters is the inability by those same providers to actually make the services easy to access, in the same way Apple makes its technology intuitive and accessible; they want it easy to use, with a user-friendly interface. They don’t care how it works, or why it works and rightfully so. They don’t need to. It should ‘just work’ right out of the well packaged and marketed box as promised. It’s not a uniquely Irish problem, but one that is in the forefront of the Irish cloud space.
Too often a start-up (usually the most common adopter in Ireland of cloud services) approaches a cloud service provider for a solution, only to be told the solution they want is a problem, as opposed to the provider having the solution to the prospect’s problems. Often the prospective cloud customer must rejig their needs to fit into the provider’s expensive monthly template.
I personally experienced from a particular hyper-visor supplier’s seminar last year a presentation about the benefits of this cloud platform solution to the service provider in maximising return and revenue, with very little if no emphasis on the benefits for the end user, who it ultimately must serve and be attractive to want to acquire services on. The perception presented was that ‘it was cloud and it will sell itself and to make hay while the sun shines’.
And yet in spite of these kind of issues, the cloud in Ireland has had a large number of successes, which those in the industry know exist, but won’t discuss, or are afraid to share. As a result, success stories in the cloud in Ireland to date have been given minimum coverage, despite the current hype.
If the cloud in Ireland is to grow in line with that hype, genuine use cases and indeed, more cloud-based businesses must be encouraged to come on stream, innovate and ultimately be a leading part of the ‘smart economy’ Ireland’s politicians have waxed so lyrically about during countless media interview sound-bytes.
While the Goodbody Economic Consultants report rightly indicated the level of hype for cloud in Ireland, and the many job possibilities, it really failed to highlight what the opportunities were, or indeed explain the Cloud in any detail to help drive the point home and to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, which has driven the cloud in Ireland to date.
Yes, it has garnered further awareness and excitement, as well as help ignite sparks of hope for jobs in the smart economy, but the example of Ireland’s fervor for ‘hype and excitement’ in property in the early part of this decade did it no favours. The fervor for this must have follow through. It must be purposeful, and not turn into the same level of emptiness that the property boom did in Ireland. Cloud in Ireland, or anywhere else must be about working smarter to gain better results as we face into an uncertain set of economic circumstances that our previous ideas about IT enabling business had alluded to.
The cloud and it’s strategy in Ireland now needs the Irish Government, arm in arm with its global commercial links and partners to work together to ensure that it nurtures this space adequately and appropriately. That it actively encourages the lead Ireland’s native cloud industry has taken thus far, and supports the jobs it has, can and will create in the future. It is with this impetus that it can contribute to the economic recovery in Ireland, and across Europe, with an excitement and energy that we all need; one that is found in abundance within those same cloud companies daily.
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