The human cost of cloud – what does it mean for tech jobs?
The main drivers pushing businesses towards the adoption of some form of cloud computing are frequently expressed in terms of reducing capital and operating costs while simplifying the ongoing management of IT systems. The arguments for cloud computing have become familiar and well-rehearsed in recent years: it’s cost-effective, quick and easy to implement, gives businesses the ability to run the latest and greatest software and to scale upwards (and downwards) as required.
Embracing IT Service Management in the Cloud
There’s a lot of pressure these days on IT organizations to come up with more efficient ways of managing IT environments. A lot of that effort seems to focus on revamping the internal help desk by embracing new processes such as those defined by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) specification.
An Open Network for an Open Cloud
The cloud takes the pressure off of server and storage resources in the hunt for more performance and capacity, but it places it squarely on the shoulders of network infrastructure.
But the more that enterprises rely on their networks (and other networks) to accelerate productivity, the more they come to realize the deficiencies of the proprietary network architectures that have evolved over the years. After all, limitless scalability and dynamic flexibility are only possible if data can smoothly negotiate the myriad pathways linking resources together.
Final Thoughts on the Five-Day AWS Outage
Five full days after its largest outage hit on the morning of April 21, Amazon Web Services said it finally has restored virtually all services to its customers.
However, there still are a lot of smoldering IT managers who haven’t yet cooled off completely from the outage that started at 1:41 a.m. PDT April 21 at the AWS data center in Northern Virginia.
Infosec: Cloud computing ‘explodes’ the security perimeter
Cloud computing makes the argument for protecting data, rather than the perimeter, stronger, according to encryption solutions provider SafeNet.
This is just one of the issues that the cloud computing trend poses for IT professionals, who, according to a recent report from Accenture and the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Outsourcing Unit, are still on the whole unconvinced by the cloud, due to security and privacy concerns.
Big data: You’ll have it, but can you handle it?
In 1999, I was called in to troubleshoot a customer’s client/server application that had recently failed a government acceptance test by taking more than 20 minutes to complete queries during stress testing. After months of intense software redesign that included overcoming pushback from a recalcitrant software development team, we were able to increase query performance by 2,000 percent, and the system subsequently passed its acceptance test.
Really Remote Data
Researchers at Cambridge University want to put data centers in places so remote they aren’t on any power grid. Their models indicate that moving data-hungry computation to places such as scorching deserts, windswept peaks, and the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—all rich in sunlight and wind energy—could allow this otherwise unharvestable energy to do useful work.
Learning the Right Lessons from the Amazon Outage
Amax Rolls Out New Cloud Appliance for SMBs
CloudMax is an on-premises, x86-based private cloud appliance that integrates hardware, storage, networking, virtualization and dynamic management to create a private cloud environment.
Building a smart engine for multi-cloud, highly available IaaS
Grazed from CloudNod. Author: Scott Sanchez.
I’ve been having a conversation on twitter with @reillyusa this morning about how a “cloud of clouds” could help prevent a single point of failure like we saw take down so many sites yesterday due to issues at AWS. One availability zone or region goes down at AWS? No problem, as service levels started to degrade your apps/data/state/etc was moved to another zone or to Rackspace or someone else. The engine would reduce the cost of having HA because it would make smart decisions about where, how and why to move workloads, and could even have a bunch of hot/warm instances running that are transparently shared across users to reduce the cost of having your own ‘dedicated’ instances at other clouds waiting for you to fail…