By now everyone is likely aware that some Amazon customers using the East availability zones are having issues ranging from being completely down, to having read-only access to data, to having performance issues. I am not going to recap the problem here because it has been summarized both correctly and incorrectly numerous times already today. What I am going to talk about is redundancy and the perception that it is a no brainer to simply... Read More
Lawson CEO eats crow and deploys on Amazon
Do you remember this article in 2008 when Lawson CEO Harry Debes made a bold prediction that the SaaS market would collapse in 2 years? He also made some classic quotes that he most likely regrets like these: ZDNet: Won’t people avoid the mistakes of “previous” SaaS incarnations, as you mentioned? Debes: People are stupid. History has shown it repeats itself, and people make the same mistakes. Debes: …”Getting... Read More
Cloud architectures: Part 1 – Reliability and Scalability
My team and I have been architecting an enterprise platform for over a year now. Our platform is an aggregation model that connects multiple channel partners to multiple retail partners and is 100% cloud based. I wish I could share some of our architectural drawings with you, but since I can’t I have created some very generalized diagrams that allow me to discuss architecting for the cloud without giving away our secret sauce. When... Read More
Lessons learned from a year in the Clouds
This month marks the first anniversary of when my startup, M-Dot Network, started building our enterprise solution on Amazon’s cloud computing platform. So as I reflect on a year that went by in a blur, I decided to share my thoughts on what I learned about cloud computing. Low startup costs One of the first things we had to do after we defined our business architecture, was to create a demo that our CEO could take with him on the... Read More
What the masses are missing about the Cloud – Part 1
Every day I read numerous articles that are negative towards cloud computing . I can sum them up with the following bullets: The cloud is insecure Cloud computing is immature Cloud is nothing new. We have been doing this for years. Cloud computing is not really cheaper Most of the people who continue to doubt the value of the cloud have not actually rolled up their sleeves and proved any of their theories. I typically try to ignore this... Read More
Potential Impacts of Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud
I usually don’t get involved in vendor discussions. I like to think of myself as vendor agnostic (or some say anti-vendor). But I think today’s announcement of Amazon offering a virtual private cloud (VPC) solution is rather significant for a number of reasons. 1. Clarity of the Private Cloud definition Chris Hoff’s post sums it up the best: In one fell swoop, AWS has: Legitimized Private Cloud as a reasonable, needed, and... Read More
