SLAs for an application or service built in the cloud is the combination of: SLAs from the cloud vendors (ex: AWS, Azure, Heroku, etc.) SLAs from the apps built on top of the cloud vendors Cloud Vendor SLAs and compliance I analyzed the SLAs of some of the top cloud service providers and was surprised about what I found. For most well established IaaS and PaaS providers, SLAs ranged from 99.9% to 100%. One major PaaS solution, Heroku, does... Read More
Cloud Economics – Part 5: The Founder’s Dilemma
Welcome to part 5 of my 6 part series on how the cloud is changing the economics of business. This post focuses on an economic challenge that many founders are facing: The SaaS model is driving the prices of services down while the engineering efforts required to deliver on-demand services is more complex than in past models driving costs up. In other words, it takes a significant amount of engineering to build a real time, highly... Read More
How to be PCI Compliant in the Cloud
There has been a lot of talk lately about PCI Compliance in the cloud. Amazon even admitted that PCI Level 1 could not be achieved on the AWS platform. Of course the pundits took that comment and immediately wrote off the cloud as a possible solution for systems that process payments. There is a big difference between the saying you can’t run your entire application in the public cloud and be PCI compliant versus you can’t use... Read More
Secure Hybrid Cloud Architectures
There are a lot of discussions going on about security and compliance in the cloud. The concerns are valid, but the belief that they can’t be resolved are not. When you buy a cluster of servers and install them in your data center, are they secure? Of course not. There are many things one must do from the perspective of hardware, operating systems, process and policy, network, data center, and software in order to secure those servers... Read More
