MJ Shoer

This week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage System (S3) suffered a major outage. The outage lasted throughout most of Tuesday, Feb. 28. While the S3 system is a back-end system, the system is used by literally hundreds of thousands of websites and Internet of Things (IoT) services.

The AWS S3 system is a public Cloud hosting platform. It hosts websites, Internet accessible applications and sharing sites for data and images. Because of the outage, you may not have been able to reach a website, or the site may not have been displaying images. Nest, the popular smart thermostat, smoke/carbon monoxide detector and webcam was impacted. If you have one or more of these devices, you would have been unable to manage them, get alerts, etc.

Whats worse is that Amazons status page, where they report on the real-time health of the AWS services was also broken. This meant that companies that have systems hosted on S3 with AWS were unable to see the status of the system and more importantly, updates on Amazons progress resolving the issue. That last point being the most important. Once you know you have a problem, the most important thing you can do is keep your customers updated on the status and estimated time of restoration of services.

What this clearly points out is the weakness of the public Cloud. If you put all of your eggs in one basket and only run your systems in one public Cloud, an outage like this will cripple your business, at least for the time of the outage. The impact to your brand and success of your product and/or service could be immeasurable.

The only way to safeguard against this risk is with multi-provider redundancy. AWS and Microsofts Azure have established themselves as the market leaders. What if you could replicate your systems between both platforms, so that one could be your active, or primary, service and the other could be your passive, or secondary, service? If you build out network redundancy within just one provider, if that provider has an outage, both your primary and secondary systems could end up offline. If you ran each on a different service platform, you should be able to stay up and running through an outage at just a single provider.

With Internet enabled apps and services becoming more the norm than the exception, building out this type of redundancy becomes critical, quickly. The industry recognizes this and has coined the phrase Multi-Cloud Management. Basically, this means being able to configure, control and maintain mirrored infrastructures between two Cloud providers.

This concept is not dissimilar from redundancy within traditional on-premise infrastructures. In this example, companies would establish a primary server closet or data center and a redundant one elsewhere in the building or nearby. The point here is simply that the company controls the infrastructure and therefore the redundancy.

Multi-Cloud Management extends this to the public Cloud. As outlined above, this concept allows companies to establish their Cloud based infrastructures with market leaders like AWS or Azure and then properly maintain it. For those that find on-premise redundancy too expensive, this may provide a highly attractive alternative.

Of course, this all depends on having the right applications and/or services that are able to be moved to the public Cloud. If they are, how will you manage them in an efficient manner? All considerations for which you must develop a strategy.

The Cloud holds tremendous opportunity and if you were impacted by this weeks AWS outage, you understand how important redundancy is, both on-premise and in the Cloud.

MJ Shoer is Chief Technology Officer of Internet & Telephone, LLC, a provider of First Class Service for customers voice and data needs, with offices in Boston and Methuen, MA and Portsmouth, NH. He maintains a blog about business IT issues at http://www.mjshoer.com and may be reached at mshoer@itllc.net.

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Amazon Web Services outage highlights Cloud risks - Foster's Daily Democrat

March 2, 2017 by Mae Anderson This Sept. 6, 2012, file photo, shows the Amazon logo in Santa Monica, Calif. Amazon's cloud-computing service Amazon Web Services experienced problems in its eastern U.S. region, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2017, causing widespread problems for thousands of websites and apps. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon, File)

Amazon says an incorrectly typed command during a routine debugging of its billing system caused the five-hour outage of some Amazon Web Services servers on Tuesday.

In a summary posted online, the Seattle company says a command meant to remove a small number of servers for one of its S3 subsystems was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed. A full restart was required, which took longer than expected due to how fast Amazon Web Services has grown over the past few years.

Amazon says it is making changes to its system to make sure incorrect commands won't trigger an outage of its web services in the future.

Amazon is the world's largest provider of cloud services, which entails hosting companies' computing functions on remote servers.

Explore further: When Amazon's cloud storage fails, lots of people get wet

2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Usually people don't notice the "cloud"unless, that is, it turns into a massive storm. Which was the case Tuesday when Amazon's huge cloud-computing service suffered a major outage.

US online giant Amazon on Tuesday announced the launch of a "unified communications service" which offers video and audio conferencing through its cloud computing service.

Can Amazon's Echo speaker really be a witness to a murder?

Amazon on Monday said it was sorry for a Web Services mishap that put online film streaming service Netflix out of commission on Christmas Eve.

Amazon.com is still trying to restore computers used by other websites as an outage stretched into a third day.

(Phys.org) Computer services company Cycle Computing has announced that it has used Amazon's servers to run software for a client that simulated the properties of 205,000 molecules over an 18 hour period using 156,000 ...

A team from the University of Leicester's Department of Engineering has, for the first time ever, vibration-mapped the famous London bell Big Ben in order to reveal why it produces its distinct harmonious tone.

Despite advancements in fuel-saving technologies over the last 25 years, on-road fuel economy for all vehicles is up only one mile per gallon during that time.

Amazon says an incorrectly typed command during a routine debugging of its billing system caused the five-hour outage of some Amazon Web Services servers on Tuesday.

The car of the future will let you pay for petrol or parking directly from your vehicle and receive traffic alerts and restaurant recommendations from your onboard digital assistant.

For 2017, Toyota has added its most fuel-efficient Prius ever: a plug-in gasoline-electric hybrid called Prius Prime that can travel up to 640 miles on a full electric charge and a single tank of fuel.

Imagine you're waiting in your car and a poster for a concert from a local band catches your eye. What if you could just tune your car to a radio station and actually listen to that band's music? Or perhaps you see the poster ...

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Fat finger: Typo caused Amazon's big cloud-computing outage - Phys.Org

Nearly half (40 percent)of federal government employees dont know if cloud computing has had a positive or a negative impact on their department or agency, according to new research from Deloitte, highlighting a major issue as government agencies continue in their push to cloud adoption and data center consolidation.

Less than one in four respondents (24 percent) say cloud computing has had a positive impact on their organization, according to Deloittes Mastering the Migrationreport, which surveyed328 federal government employees from over 30 departments and agencies.

Fortypercent of respondents do not know if cloud adoption has helped or hindered their organization, and a further 31 percent say it has had neither positive or negative impact. Almost every category in which dont know was an available response, it was the most common.

The survey also found that lift and shift strategies have been the primary method of meeting the federal governments Cloud First policy. Only one in five respondents said their organization is extensively using cloud native applications (5 percent), or even piloting applications developed for the cloud (14 percent).

The promise of the cloud is huge, but the journey isnt easy, Doug Bourgeois, managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP said in a statement. Cloud value cannot be achieved through technology aloneits about governance, security, people, and processes. This report validates that support for cloud in federal agencies is growing, but perceptions of its impact vary significantly. Agencies need to rethink their core development principles and strategy for going cloud native.

Nine percent of those surveyed say their cloud migration has been successful, while 41 percent characterize it as mixed, problematic, or non-existent. As usual, security was identified as the greatest concern and challenge of cloud adoption, followed by skills and budget limitations.

A survey last year by MeriTalk found that 82 percent of public sector cloud adopters say their agency will increase spending on cloud computing in 2017.

Limited migrations and incomplete migration plans identified three years after the 2011 adoption of the Cloud First policy were largely attributed to staffing and procurement challenges by an Accenture report.

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Report: Many Federal Government Employees Oblivious of Cloud Computing Impact - Web Host Industry Review

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) faced a setback Tuesday due to an outage at its cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services, or AWS.

Does this development open a window for competing platforms to pick up market share?

Amazon said its cloud service was hit by a partial failure of a hosting platform. The widespread outage affected a number of Internet services, including Slack, Trello, Splitwise and Medium, and numerous media outlets.

Related Link: Amazon Web Services Is 'Destroying' Its Competition

"We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-East-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue," Amazon said in an update on the outage midday Tuesday.

By late-afternoon Tuesday, the company said its S3 service was operating normally.

AWS, officially launched in 2006, has been a highly profitable business for Amazon, fetching $12.22 billion in revenue and $3.11 billion in operating profit for the company in 2016. So, a far-reaching outage is a concern for the business.

On the day AWS suffered the outage, its uptime the amount of time the service is functioning stood at 99.59 percent, according to Forbes. It's a solid number, although it falls beneath the company's 99.95 percent target.

Tuesday's outage led Forbes contributor Patrick Moorhead to question the faith companies place in public cloud services at the expense of in-house IT.

Public cloud platforms do offer the advantages of agility, a metered business model, robust toolsets, endless innovation and more. Moorhead instead recommends a hybrid IT approach, where some IT services are in-house and some are in the cloud.

Amazon's competitors

Against the backdrop of the AWS outage, Benzinga looked at which other cloud computing platforms stand to benefit now that Amazon's vulnerability stands exposed.

Though Amazon's AWS, with its first entrant advantage, is the leader of the pack, it's not without competition.Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT), Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) are all breathing down Amazon's neck.

All of these providers offer two layers of cloud: namely, Internet as a service, or Iaas, and Platform as a Service, or Paas. The former allows virtual servers and storage to be set up in someone else's data center, while the latter allows developers to build applications.

Amazon's AWS held a 33.8 percent global market share in cloud computing as of the fourth quarter of 2016, as opposed to a 30.8 percent share for Microsoft, Google and IBM combined, according to ZDNet.

Microsoft had launched a competing product, Azure, by 2010. The company won points on its enterprise know-how and established customer base, and businesses can easily transfer their Windows apps to the Azure cloud, according to Business Insider. Microsoft's Enterprise Agreement with clients translates into discounts on Microsoft software, too, the publication said.

Google's entry into cloud computing started in 2008 with the Google App Engine, whichallowed developers build their apps. Google later added many features and renamed the service as the Google Cloud Platform in 2013. Google's advantage in the arena is the trust developers have with the company due to its allegiance to open-source philosophy.

Other players in the sector include IBM and Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL). IBM promotes hybrid cloud and hasn't found much traction with small- and medium-sized companies.

Oracle has pushed its cloud product largely only to existing customers, according to Business Insider.

Other competitors have simply tried and then given up. Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE: RAX) sold its Cloud Sites business unit to hosting company Liquid Web last August. A report in the IT publication The Register suggests Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) will shut down its Cisco Intercloud Services public cloud in 2017.

Amazon may have taken a hit from the outage, but its dominant presence means the hit is unlikely to be crippling. The rivals have a lot of catching up to do to make a dent to Amazon's positioning in the market. That said, the recent outage could reignite corporate discussions concerning hybrid IT environments.

Posted-In: Amazon Amazon Web Services AWS cloud computing GoogleNews Tech Trading Ideas Best of Benzinga

2017 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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With Confidence In AWS Shaken, Who Could Benefit? - Benzinga

Cloud Computing has evolved greatly over the years since it came into existence in the early 90s. Cloud computing has already started to revolutionize the way we store and access data. We currently see smartphone applications use cloud computing technologies to allow users to store and access date that they previously could not do on a smart device.

Cloud computing is slowly gaining acceptance within businesses. It is predicted that by 2018, 59% of cloud workload will be generated from Software-as-a- Service (SaaS). According to a recent survey, 43% of IT decision makers are planning to invest more into cloud computing.

Clouds popularity has grown immensely, as more and more recognize its benefits of improving data access, freeing up IT resources for more strategic tasks, cutting and increasing flexibility and efficiency. The usage of cloud services has become closely associated with common cloud offerings, such as Software as a service (SaaS), Platform as service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

While cloud solutions have been the answer for many, some are still hesitant to utilize this new technology. While there are advantages and disadvantages associated with most business models, it is up to the business owner and the nature of the companys daily transactions that dictate whether the system is right for their industry. Here are the key challenges that should be addressed to clearly demonstrate that cloud computing is a viable alternative to traditional, on-premises applications and data-center operations. Read below to explore some of the challenges and concerns.

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Cloud architecture do not automatically grant security compliance for the end-user data or apps on them, so apps written for cloud have to be secure in their own terms. Some of the responsibility for this does fall to cloud vendors, but the lions share of it is still in the lap of the application designers. Cloud computing introduces another level of risks because essential services are often outsourced to a third party, making it harder to maintain data integrity and privacy.

We have probably passed the days when people thought cloud were just big server clusters, but that doesnt mean that we can ignore the fact about cloud moving forward. There are also too many misunderstandings about how public and private cloud work together, misunderstandings about how easy it is to move from one kind of infrastructure to another. A good way to combat this is to prevent customers with real-world examples of what is possible and why so that they can base their understanding on the actual working.

One of the major concerns associated with cloud computing is its dependency on the cloud service provider. For uninterrupted and fast cloud service you need to choose a vendor with proper infrastructure and technical expertise. Since you would be running your companys asset and data from a third party interface ensuring data security and privacy are of utmost importance. Hence, when engaging a cloud service provider, always inquire about their cloud-based security policies. However, cloud service companies usually employ strict data security policies to prevent hacking and invest heavily in improved infrastructure and software.

Many applications have complex integration needs to connect to applications on the cloud network, as well as to other on-premises applications. These include integrating existing cloud services with existing enterprise applications and data structures. There is need to connect the cloud application with the rest of the enterprise in a simple, quick and cost-effective way. Integrating new applications with existing ones is a significant part of the process and cloud services bring even more challenges from an integration perspective.

Cloud service providers still lack the round-the-clock service, this result in frequent outages. It is important to monitor the service being provided using internal or third-party tools. It is vital to have plans to supervise usage, performance and business dependency of these cloud services.

Businesses can save money on hardware but they have to spend more for the bandwidth. This could be a low cost for small applications but can be significantly high for the data-intensive applications. Delivering intensive and complex data over the network requires sufficient bandwidth. Because of this many enterprises are waiting for a reduced cost, before switching to the cloud services.

There are three types of cloud environments available private, public and hybrid. The secret of successful cloud implementation lies in choosing the most appropriate cloud set-up. Big companies feel safer with their vast data in private cloud environment, small enterprises often benefit economically by hosting their services in public cloud. Some companies also prefer the hybrid cloud because it is flexible, cost-effective and offers a mix of public and private cloud services.

One of the major issues with cloud computing is its dependency on the service provider. The companies providing cloud services charge businesses for utilizing cloud computing services based on usage. Customers typically subscribe to cloud services to avail their services. For uninterrupted and fast services one needs to choose a vendor with proper infrastructure and technical expertise. You need a vendor who can meet the necessary standards. The service-level agreement should be read carefully and understood in details in case of outage, lock-in-clauses etc. Cloud service is any service made available to businesses or corporates from a cloud computing providers server. In other words, cloud services are professional services that support organizations in selecting, deploying and management various cloud-based resources.

These challenges should not be considered as roadblocks in the pursuit of cloud computing. It is rather important to give serious considerations to these issues and the possible ways out before adopting the technology. Cloud computing are rapidly gaining enterprise adoption, yet many IT professionals still remain skeptical, for good reason. Issues like security and standards continue to challenge this emerging technology. Strong technical skills will be essential to address the security and integration issues in the long run. There are also issues faced while making transitions from the on-premise set-up to the cloud services like data migration issues and network configuration issues. But planning ahead can avoid most of these problems with cloud configurations. The extent of the advantages and disadvantages of cloud services vary from business to business, so it is important for any business to weigh these up when considering their move into cloud computing.

Cloud computing is the next stage in the Internets evolution, providing the means through which everything from computing power to computing infrastructure, applications to business processes can be delivered as a cloud service wherever you need. Cloud Computing promises substantial benefits for small, medium and large organizations. Some say cloud computing is still struggling in its infancy, with positive and negative comments made on its possible implementation for a large-sized enterprise. On the other hand, enterprises are under great pressure to take advantage of cloud services, but they need to fully understand the challenges cloud computing brings. Switching to cloud services offers tremendous benefits to the organization and its users. It is important that companies select a provider that will help support the transition and counterbalance the challenges. However like any major concept, it always starts off slowly, but once organizations realize the advantages of cloud services, it will pick up pace rapidly. Despite these challenges, companies are increasingly aware of the business values that cloud computing bring and are taking steps towards the transition to the Cloud.

Dina Destreza is a raving IT professional, Blogger and Speaker. She has spent the last 15 years studying the internet and how to use it to communicate effectively. She loves writing about emerging technology on mobile phone, gadgets and other technology related stuff. Currently she is working with Keyideas Viewfullprofile

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Challenges of Cloud Service Development - Business 2 Community - Business 2 Community