[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA
Mon, Apr 25 2011 0:05 bradley

The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment

The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment - O'Reilly Broadcast:
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/04/the-aws-outage-the-clouds-shining-moment.html

I think the biggest failure with Amazon's outtage is of communication.

It's an interesting read.  My biggest take away is that cloud deployment is another tool, another option, but just like with on premises, don't assume that anything is guaranteed.

Don't trust your vendors.  Get the gory details.  Test.  Don't assume.  Yeah you need to be testing using the cloud and what it means, because it doesn't always mean better, sometimes it just means different.

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# re: The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment

Monday, April 25, 2011 12:01 PM by SeanPT

One thing that helped me come to grips with the reality of the cloud was understanding one of the big motives behind it: continual profit stream.

For example, with Microsoft they would make money on the old model once and that was when you got new hardware. So you buy a server, MS got money off of Server 2003. Then if you didn't buy any more CALs then they didn't get any money from you. When they said "go to S2003R2" and you said "nope, we are good!" they didn't make money. Same thing with Windows, Office, etc.

They tried to get away from this with software assurance but it really wasn't working for them.

Plus they made no money of off pirated software.

But let's look at Azure and Office 365. First off, you can't pirate those two products so they have 0 lost sales to pirate versions of Office 365 and Azure. They also have a continual revenue stream. If you come to depend on Azure and Office 365 then MS will have money coming from your business from now until the end of time (well, your business's time).

So of course Microsoft is "all-in" on the cloud and so is Amazon and every other vendor.

But in that race I think there has been a lot of dubious marketing -- but that is nothing new. Heck, we see dubious marketing on non-cloud products like SBS2011. I laugh every time I see the claim made that SBS2011 doesn't need IT support.

So when they talk about not needing to worry about your servers because they are in the cloud and not needing to worry about your data because it is in the cloud and all of those things I laugh all the same. Maybe I don't need to worry AS MUCH about Patch Tuesday but I still need to be in the know. Maybe I don't need to worry about my load balancer but I need to make sure I've setup my services correctly. So when you move to the cloud the responsibilities don't go away -- they just change.

What doesn't change is my distrust of all things marketing.

# re: The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment

Monday, April 25, 2011 11:38 PM by Dean

Just reading part of that article tells me that this Cloud stuff is wwwwwaaaaaaayyyyy to complicated and when something is that complicated there is going to be a lot of problems.

I also agree with everything SeanPT said above except for one thing. Most of these Cloud services that you can buy don't seem to be for replacements for your MS servers. They seem to be for custom made programs that run on anything but MS software. Microsoft is about the only Cloud provider that is providing MS software which makes sense. I know you can get Cloud servers and run MS software on them but I don't think that is the major use.