If startup history tells us anything, it’s that the majority of cloud services launched in the past few years won’t be around forever. The fact that they just vanish into the ether makes the problem quite perplexing. Read more »
Last week, Orange France’s mobile network tanked, knocking out the mobile phones of millions of subscribers. This week the same thing happened to O2 in the U.K. U.S. carriers like Verizon and T-Mobile aren’t immune either. Global networks have developed a big signaling problem. Read more »
With more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Demand for cloud computing continues to increase exponentially as consumers, businesses and government agencies seek to defer the expense of acquiring, operating and maintaining infrastructure and applications to third-party service providers. Likewise, software publishers are finding the cloud computing model an efficient and effective mechanism for delivering their products as a service and as an operational expense to their customers. For independent software vendors, cloud computing is opening up new markets and making their applications more accessible and affordable to scores of new customers. For a multitude of reasons, many ISVs are choosing to forego data center development and are partnering with hosting providers that have the infrastructure, resources and expertise in managing and delivering cloud services. This report provides ISVs with guidance on partnering with hosting companies, establishing criteria for selecting a hosting service, metrics for measuring hosting performance as it relates to cloud services delivered and an understanding of the responsibilities they retain even when outsourcing a large part of their services functions to a third party. Companies mentioned in this report include Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If your company has a cloud application with a predictable audience size or one that is costing you more than $25,000 a month to host, you may want to consider maintaining a private cloud. This paper provides an overview of the factors that decision makers who are developing a public-to-private cloud-migration strategy should consider, recognizing that public versus private cloud strategy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It also details pitfalls that must be avoided along the way and provides a case study of Zynga, a company that has found a way to use both the private and public clouds to create a hybrid solution. Companies mentioned in this report include Akamai, Foursquare, Nimbula and ARM. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Last week’s outages at Microsoft and Amazon Web Services reiterated a very important lesson in cloud computing: Even the best-laid plans won’t stand up to an act of god or faulty electrical infrastructure. That’s why the burgeoning field of cloud insurance looks even better than ever. Read more »
The service provider responsible for Groupon’s daily e-mail deals, suffered a server outage this weekend that looks to have had a staggering effect on Groupon sales in several cities. This seems to play up Groupon’s overall dependence on emails as the primary method of subscriber interaction. Read more »
The four-day-long Amazon Web Services outage was no doubt a traumatic experience for many customers, but that didn’t have to be the case. There were plenty of users that were not affected, were minimally affected or that acted in a hurry to resolve the problem. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has put the outage behind them and now are getting back to normal, according to the latest status update from Amazon Web Services on its Service Health Dashboard. Performance data from Cedexis shows what it meant in terms of network latency. Read more »
Amazon Web Services claims to be making significant progress in restoring functionality to a large number of EC2, Elastic Block Storage and Relational Database Service instances that went down due to a “networking event” in the early-morning hours and affected a number of popular web sites. Read more »
Reddit suffered some major downtime yesterday, a situation it largely on a failure on the part of Amazon Web Services. But the real takeaway might have to do with the importance for cloud users to make sure all is well with their cloud deployments. Read more »
Around the world, organizations and individuals are coming together to tackle technological hurdles to cloud computing. Just this week, Intel launched its Open Data Center Alliance and Cloud Builders initiatives; last week, CloudAudit joined the Cloud Security Alliance. But when it comes down to it, people, ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
As we’re hosted on WordPress.com, we were affected by an outage of their network of blogs today that’s been attributed to a core router change. The company’s 10.2 million hosted blogs were down for 110 minutes, for a projected page view loss of 5.5 million. Read more »
Shortly before Christmas, my iPhone started misbehaving. I’d get an odd little notification message popping up on the screen telling me it “Could not activate cellular data network.” Despite not usually getting odd little errors on the iPhone, I didn’t worry too much about it. After […] Read more »
At $99 a year, I expect my online service to function all the time. So perhaps that is why I am a little upset that Apple hasn’t been able to launch their MobileMe service properly and are experiencing outages. The fact that the service was supposed […] Read more »
