Kategorie: Analysis

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Analysis

Find your return on investment (ROI) of cloud computing

Companies are encouraged to determine the value of any investment with the return on investment (ROI). For new technologies / concepts such as cloud computing this is not trivial, since there is currently a little to no experience. Startups are more unbiased, as they have no comparative figures with classical systems, established companies, however, are dependent on it.

Return on Investment

The purpose of the „return on investment“ metric is to measure, per period, rates of return on money invested in an economic entity in order to decide whether or not to undertake an investment. ROI and related metrics provide a snapshot of profitability, adjusted for the size of the investment assets tied up in the enterprise. ROI is often compared to expected (or required) rates of return on money invested. Marketing decisions have obvious potential connection to the numerator of ROI (profits), but these same decisions often influence assets usage and capital requirements (for example, receivables and inventories).

Source: Wikipedia.org

How to determine the ROI of the cloud?

It’s not so easy to determine a ROI for something you can not judge really good or you actually not know, and above all has no numerical data. Thus, one should look for areas that reflect no hard numbers, but still demonstrate the value and benefits of cloud computing. This is about saving costs, optimizing processes, improving the agility and a practical profit from the use of cloud computing.

Saving costs

After ​​an overview of previously used applications and sorting them into classes, it’s time to filter out potential candidates, for which a change in the cloud can cut costs. One possible candidate is the ERP system, which could be migrated to a cloud environment. Based on the consolidation and virtualization thus the actual number of required servers and simultaneously the necessary racks are reduced.

It’s the same for companies that have an R & D department and want to minimize the hardware infrastructure of their laboratory. Savings can be found primarily in the development and maintenance of the applications and hardware environments. But also lower expenses for the installation of software reduces costs through the use of cloud-based applications and reduces the necessary budget. Another advantage: The cloud-based solutions can be deployed on any workstation using a web browser.

Enterprises who continue to host their infrastructure on-premise will notice quickly that operating a cloud infrastructure in-house, means large investments in own hardware and software. Hosting in the cloud means to transform fixed costs into variable costs. As a result of the pay as you go model, only the resources are calculated, which are actually used.

Due to small hurdles and little technical knowledge not even IT staff can use cloud computing to buy infrastructure and applications for the company. This leads to savings in working costs and know-how as well as installation and maintenance costs, compare total cost of ownership.

Process optimization and agility

Due to the on-demand model cloud applications help to optimize business processes by focussing on developing the knowledge and solutions. Companies are therefore more agile and can respond more quickly to market changes and identify new opportunities to grow.

When a company grows or changes, it requires more resources quick. This may take a few weeks to several months and also includes to train staff. All this means a stop for the business. Cloud computing enables the rapid provisioning of required resources and thus represents the scaling safely.

Cost does not always say much

The successful use of cloud computing is not always expressed in figures. Therefore, the ROI of cloud computing is best determined from the utility. Administrators and CIOs should obviously regard the values ​​that occur when using. You should for example ask what you can expect from the use of a particular service. On this basis further questions, based on the benefits, can be developed that do not focus on the financial side. Thus, for example, metrics are related to the visible benefits of a cloud service, it is able to deliver. Metrics could be:

  • How is it with the technical support and other services that are provided by the vendor?
  • Can savings be achieved?
  • How complicated is the billing process?
  • What is the ease of use of the service?
  • Is the dynamic use of the new service guaranteed?
  • How flexible is the new service in relation to changes and changing requirements?
  • How fast can the new cloud service be adapted and deployed?
  • What are the maintenance and upgrade costs as well as the downtime compared to the cloud service?
  • What is the impact on the company if services are refer from the cloud in the future?
  • What are the risks related to the business processes and data stored in the cloud?
  • Could the satisfaction of my employees be increased?
  • Has the agility and flexibility improved?

The ROI is important, but…

The return on investment is an important metric in a company, but you should not take the financial side as the only basis of the ROI. Particularly in cloud computing, the value and benefits of the services are not always reflected in the monetary field. And even if the metric is sometimes not tangible, the value that a cloud service provides for a company should not be ignored, and instead be carefully considered.

So, do you consider the better agility, flexibility and satisfaction of your employees while calculate the ROI of the cloud? No? But you should!

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Analysis

Your cloud computing strategy: The use case is the starting point

What are the key elements of a cloud strategy? This question is not easy and can usually only be answered in general because there is not „the“ master plan for a cloud strategy. Which nor exists for a corporate strategy or IT strategy.

The use case is the center point

An IT strategy always has the task of supporting the company’s strategy as best as possible. Because nowadays, can or rather should a possible corporate strategy be derived from the IT strategy. A good reference is the „IT Governance business architecture“ from „Referenzmodelle für IT-Governance“ by Wolfgang Johannsen and Matthias Goeken. The model is very theoretical, but show how all parts of a company should be connected.

Your cloud computing strategy: the use case is the starting point

Graphic from „Referenzmodelle für IT-Governance“ by Wolfgang Johannsen, Matthias Goeken

It is the same with a cloud strategy. The question is how can cloud services support the business strategy. This must necessarily not reflected in hard numbers like „x percent higher sales achieved“. If a company, for example, based on software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enables its employees to work more flexible (from home or a coffee shop), it has done something for the productivity of its employees what in intermediate-term or even in short-range shows in numbers. Another possible approach is to use the cloud for the own innovation of the company, since it is faster to get resources and therefore to look at short notice if the idea could work. Keyword: research and development.

Cloud strategy: top-down or bottom-up

For this you can use the top-down or bottom-up approach, which is often used in computer science, to obtain an understanding of the impact of cloud computing on the strategy of a company.

Top-down cloud strategy

During the top-down approach the possibilities of cloud computing for a company are analyzed and a concrete use case is defined out of it. So an innovation or idea is created that is enabled based on cloud computing only. Then, on this basis, the cloud strategy is created.

Bottom-up cloud strategy

During the bottom-up approach, an existing use case will be implemented with the possibilities of cloud computing. This means it is analyzed how the cloud can help in supporting the needs of the use case as best as possible. Thereof the respective cloud strategy is derived.

Your cloud computing strategy: the use case is the starting point

Cloud strategy: top-down or bottom-up (Rene Buest, renebuest research, 2013)

It is therefore inherently superior what a company wants to achieve and how the cloud can help to reach this goal. On the other hand it is also important to understand the possibilities offered by the cloud to derive a strategy and thus to increase the innovativeness of the company. Only when you understand where to go you should take care of specific cloud solutions. The path to the cloud starts with the right use case. There must already be a concrete concept and an idea, because technologies are interchangeable.

Cloud strategy: the essential points

Apart from the actual use case, it is crucial to find the right manager, who is responsible for implementing the cloud strategy. In addition to information technology this person must also understand the needs of the business side. He should also be able to look outside the box to identify possible potentials of cloud computing for the enterprise via the top-down approach.

Services and processes

Starting from the bottom-up approach the existing processes in the company needs to be derived into services. On this basis it is easier for IT managers to evaluate possible cloud solutions which meet the needs and support the company’s goal as best as possible.

Define KPIs

Is the cloud effort successful? Like other investments and changes, the cloud strategy must made measurable. For this key performance indicator (KPI) are a proven means. One possible measure is the costs. But that should not be the only one, and in no case be the highest priority. Because cloud computing is about much more than just saving costs, it is among other things about improving the agility of a company. That would also be another KPI, the agility. For example, this may mean how much faster can the employees use services from the cloud. Another KPI could make statements about the performance of the scalability.

Chance the IT departement

Cloud computing requires new skills and responsibilities of the employees. In addition to cloud architects and other new roles, cloud service managers are needed who are responsible for services and their availability, and to evaluate new services.

Consider a multi-cloud strategy and failover

Even a public cloud is not without errors. From the beginning that should be necessarily considered in the cloud strategy by developing failover scenarios. These includes inter alia creating a sub-cloud strategy for the use of multiple clouds, which can be used in the case of an outage until the primary offer is back in service.

Find your way

Cloud Computing always starts with a use case, on which basis a cloud strategy arises. As a rule, a company already has a business and an IT strategy that maps specific use cases (button-up). Then, the cloud strategy should unite and support the goals of both and expand it in the best case.

In addition, the green field approach (top-down) can increase the level of innovation of a company by analyzing the capabilities of cloud computing and open up new opportunities for the enterprise. Hence it is able to discover a competitive advantage or find new ways that help to be more productive.

Download

You can also support CloudUser.de and download this item as a charged PDF from „Your cloud computing strategy: The use case is the starting point„.

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Analysis

Amazon acquires Eucalyptus cloud – It's merely a matter of time

In the public cloud Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently the undisputed leader. Regarding private or hybrid cloud solutions providers such as Microsoft and HP are in a better position. AWS itself has currently no own offering in this area. Instead, an exclusive partnership with Eucalyptus Systems was received in March 2012. Eucalyptus is some kind of an image of the basic AWS functions. This strategic decision is understandable and will have consequences for the future.

The cooperation between AWS and Eucalyptus

In March 2012, AWS and Eucalyptus Systems, a provider of a private cloud infrastructure software that can be used to build up the basic functions of the Amazon cloud in the own data center, have decided to work together in closer. This cooperation was strengthened by Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos and has the background to support the better migration of data between the Amazon Cloud and an Eucalyptus private cloud. Furthermore, and even more important is that the customer should be able to use the same management tools and their knowledge for both platforms. In addition, the Amazon Web Services will provide Eucalyptus with further information to improve the compatibility with the AWS APIs.

The competition is catching up

Although it is currently very rosy in the public cloud, the future lies in the hybrid cloud. In addition, many companies are flirting with their own private cloud rather than changing into the public cloud. This means that the private respectively the hybrid cloud gain increasingly important. Here the Amazon Web Services, except for the virtual private cloud, offer nothing. Microsoft and HP already have a very balanced portfolio that offers solutions and services both for the public and for the private cloud. Furthermore, both have a large customer base.

Also, another point is clear. Where Microsoft and HP focus on the big enterprises, Amazon Web Services are presently the Mecca for startups. The success speaks for itself. However, if we look at Amazon’s efforts in recent months, the target direction is clear. AWS needs and wants in the enterprise. But that’s only possible with a private / hybrid cloud strategy. Therefore Amazon will arrive at some point where it is actively looking to conquer these markets aggressively, too.

Amazon is a service provider

AWS did not make any acquisitions in the cloud space so far, because they easily do not have to. As an innovation leader, they set the standards in the public cloud. In the private / hybrid cloud, it looks different. Here, in my point of view, there is almost no expertise. Even if Amazon operates its own data centers, the operation of a quasi-standard solution for enterprise is different. Here, Microsoft and HP have years of experience, and thus a clear advantage. The Amazon Web Services are a typical service provider. This means they deliver their services from the cloud, which will simply be consumed only. Cloud software for the mass market is not developed. Providing, delivering, maintaining and rolling out updates and new releases as well as appease the customers the experience is missing. Therefore, the cooperation with Eucalyptus has been the first right step. What is not part of the core business will be outsourced. Just as Amazon market cloud computing, they seem to live it themselves.

However, Amazon will want to have more influence on the private and hybrid cloud, and also want to enjoy a piece of this cake. Therefore, the next logical step will be to acquire Eucalyptus Systems. On the one hand it is about more impact on Eucalyptus. Because even though Marten Mickos has promoted the cooperation with AWS, he will not bow to anything that Amazon requires. On the other hand, the hybrid cloud integration needs to be strengthened. In addition, qualified staff is needed for private cloud consulting, which Eucalyptus including its affiliates also brings along.

It’s merely a matter of time

When Eucalyptus Systems is taken over by Amazon is a matter of time. Perhaps in 2013 or in 2014/2015. In any case, it will happen. How Eucalyptus is then integrated is difficult to say. I assume that Eucalyptus will initially operate independently and put under the umbrella brand of Amazon described as „An Amazon company“. According to the saying, concentrate on your core business, AWS will continue to focus on the public cloud and quite look how the hybrid and private cloud will develop under their own influence. In any case, with Eucalyptus they would have the right solution for their needs in their own portfolio.

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Analysis

Cloud marketplaces are the future of cloud computing

In recent months, more and more cloud marketplaces have appeared. These include, inter alia the AWS Marketplace, the Chrome Web Store, the internet4YOU Cloud Marketplace or the Business Marketplace of Deutsche Telekom. Here, companies and also end-users can assemble their own productivity portfolio from a catalog of services and therefore have a selected overview of the possible potential candidates.

Marketplaces provide overview

A cloud marketplace is characterized primarily by the fact that it, e.g. like a classic Webshop categorized products in the form of applications, but also infrastructure. Just when a new trend established, new solutions pop up every day. That makes it for buyers, but also for end users increasingly difficult to maintain an overview of the market. Cloud marketplaces clean up and summarize the different cloud offers by themes. They form an independent ecosystem of cloud services.

Separate the wheat from the chaff

Mind you, there are many „bad“ cloud applications on the market that do not provide real value or are simply just not well thought off. Cloud marketplaces help to separate potential top applications from rather insignificant services. A decision aid is already offered by the operators of such marketplaces. So says the German Telekom, that they want to provide a variety of third-party solutions over their marketplace, but deliberately set on quality rather than quantity are. The course involves the danger that potential good applications will not make it in the marketplace because they are falling through the grid of the Telekom. On the other hand, a pre-selection is of course necessary to ensure the quality and consequently the reputation of the marketplace.
Has a service entered the marketplace, the user has an another decision criteria: „the crowd“. Using a scoring system, the quality and functionality of the application is rated and commented by other users and therefore add some more adaptation assistance.

Increase the scope

Cloud marketplaces especially can help young companies that have a low capital for advertising and PR, to increase their visibility and reach. But also established companies that start with cloud services, received opportunities to present themselves to a wide audience and to prove themselves in front of the existing competitors.

Cloud marketplaces are no cloud broker

However, one must consider that cloud marketplaces offer (in its pure form) only services and applications, without providing further added value. Instead of using the search engine of your choice to find possible offers or go directly to the websites of the provider, the access is via the marketplace. After an initial registration through the marketplace, the direct route to the provider can also be taken. The marketplace serves only as a management tool for users to add or unsubscribe any other services.

Cloud services broker however integrate and extend multiple cloud services and thus create added value around the cloud services.
The cloud services brokerage model provides an architectural, business, and IT operating model, by which various cloud services can be provided, managed and adapted. And which is located within a federated and consistent delivery, billing, security, administration and support framework. Companies are thus in a position to unify their cloud services management, in order to increase the level of innovation to improve global collaboration, reduce operational costs and to grow better. Cloud computing providers thus obtained the opportunity to unify the provisioning of their cloud services and differentiate their own services network and thereby provide a comprehensive cloud computing platform. Technology providers can build an ecosystem of value added services to differentiate their main offerings, increase customer loyalty and develop new distribution channels.

Cloud marketplaces are a logical trend

Cloud marketplaces belong to the logical development of cloud computing to enable enterprises and developers an easy access to IT resources. In addition to a well-documented API a good cloud offering also includes a clear and comprehensive web interface, enabling the user to click a cloud infrastructure together, e.g to perform a few tests. Already various vendors have jumped on this train and provide its own marketplace to access their cloud IaaS resources. They also enrich their infrastructure offerings on the market with OS images or other software solutions in order to provide the virtual resources real benefits.

Companies can imagine a cloud marketplace as several shelves in a quasi infinitely large supermarket. And they should use it just like that to assemble their infrastructure arbitrarily. It will be interesting if we go one step further and receive resources and solutions no longer exclusively from a single vendor, but rather from several providers or their marketplaces. But then we are back to the subject of cloud brokerage services.

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Analysis

“Infrastructure-as-a-Platform” – More convience in the cloud

The future of enterprise IT is x-as-a-service. Especially infrastructure-as-a-services enable quick access to computing and storage resources and are becoming more and more popular. However, what many IaaS do lack is the convenience, the comfortable configuration of the infrastructure. With infrastructure-as-a-platform (IaaP) especially small-and medium-sized businesses that do not have the necessary IT expertise get easy access to build up their virtual data center out of standard IaaS resources.

Infrastructure-as-a-Platform – Simplicity counts

What most IaaS solutions do lack is the easy access to resources that can be used to build virtual infrastructures. These are usually cloud services providers of the first generation. The offer is accessed through an API, in order to control the virtual machines and let interact all infrastructure components and services together. Graphical management / configuration interfaces are available but only with very small features. Instances can be started, stopped and shutted down, but for the configuration of complex infrastructures expertise and extensive know-how with parallel programming is necessary.

And that is the crucial factor. The ordinary user is not an cloud cloud computing expert nor must or should he be someone. He does not understand the issues that make a cloud to a cloud. And this is not necessary for him, he just wants to use the „black box“ for his own purposes. Moreover, he is not interested or even have the time to deal with the often complex systems and processes, and to learn it. Usually the average cloud user expects a coherent and integrated platform on which he can assemble his necessary IT resources over a certain period of time for his own purposes.

The future belongs to infrastructure-as-a-platform

Besides the ease of access to the resources, in particular infrastructure-as-a-platform solutions combine various IaaS resources such as computing power, storage, network components, etc. with „some clicks“ and allow companies in order to build their own data center on demand, so a „data-center-as-a-service „(DCaaS).

Already established cloud computing provider – the first generation – must begin to catch up in this area and offer their existing and new customers more convenience, so that they can use the infrastructure more conveniently and also require less time and expertise at configuration. Because IT departments, especially of small-and medium-sized companies will be watching for more comfort in the future.

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Analysis

My five cloud computing, mobile and big data predictions for 2013 and one wish

This year I actually didn’t want to participate in any speculation. But a request from Cloud Expo’s Jeremy Geelan I could not reject and have written down my own personal predictions for the cloud computing, mobile and big data market for 2013. Of course I would like to publish them here as well and also have a personal wish.

1. Big data is the new oil

We saw an enormous growth of the Big Data market incl. new solutions helping analyzing this amount of information in 2012. This will, of course, keep moving in 2013. The company who is collecting the most high-quality data, making the best analysis on it and therefore get the best high-quality results out of it place themselve in the best position on the market.

But at the end of the day we should not forget the users in this equation. Today we talk about backend systems when we mean Big Data. But we forget that we as the users are impacted too. Because of the variety of social networks, e-mail and other online and offline applications we are faced with a data (information) overload that needs to be managed to help us organizing IT respectively our lives more convenient.

2. Mobile cloud becomes more important

Actually this so called mobile cloud exists for a lot of years. Because cloud computing is the backbone of the mobile world. On a closer view it is clear that cloud computing is a guarantee of success for the mobile technology market and offers. The cloud allows providers to deliver their customers the (for them actually-bringing added value) content such as books, music, apps, etc. anywhere and across devices. Smartphones, tablets and other new upcoming mobile devices in 2013 will emphasize this trend. Especially the potential of Africa and their growing mobile market will make the mobile cloud one of the important approaches we will see in the future.

3. Mobile big data

As a result of the growing mobile market in emerging nations besides the mobile cloud, big data is becoming more important for companies to reach new customers all over the world and especially in emerging nations. They need to understand their behavior on using technologies, services in the internet and how they are consuming things. This will have a big impact for both sides the old market and new markets which will grew up and even for the new customers.

4. Hybrid cloud is the new deal

Let’s face it. The public cloud is the real cloud! But because of worries due to data privacy and data security plus new laws that give governments new rights looking into cloud data, more and more companies plan their private cloud strategy. That is not to say the public cloud is dead. We will see new services on the public cloud and even enterprises will use it for bursting out. But at the end of the day the hybrid cloud is the new deal. Enterprises need to classify their data before going to the cloud. So, sensitive data will stay in the private cloud respectively in the „just“ virtualized data center and usually data like things for marketing activities or other not so important things will go in the public cloud. Of course they need a connection and a secure combination of both private and public cloud for this bursting opportunities, the hybrid cloud.

5. Hybrid tablets go for business

Tablets help us to use IT, the internet and other things more comfortable. But they are actually not designed for an entire business use. For example on conferences and travels you always see people with a tablet plus an additional bought keyboard. Hybrid tablets are the best of both worlds, the tablets with their touchscreens and a convenient user interfaces plus classical laptops and their keyboards. Writing a lot of text on a tablet with the virtual keyboard is no fun what business users confirmed. Furthermore will hybrid tablets displace the ordinary laptops we use today.

My wish for 2013

My wish to each cloud computing vendor for 2013: Stop your nebulous marketing phrases and offer stable and value added cloud services.

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Analysis

When do we see a Microsoft Cloudbook?

With Windows 8 Microsoft put many things in the center of the cloud. As it is known from other systems a central Microsoft account can be used to synchronize settings, apps from the marketplace and data across devices. Production and media data can be integrated into the system via SkyDrive. Office 365 and Office 2013 are also available as local and cloud solutions.

The strategic realignment pays off

This also shows the strategic direction of the past months, meanwhile Microsoft has been started e.g. to market SkyDrive with very competitive prices and also to open the SkyDrive APIs for developers. Another important step was the focus on the Office suites for the cloud.

Windows Azure serves as the new central anchor

A further important step was the expansion of its cloud computing platform Windows Azure with the Windows Azure Mobile Services. Developers of Windows 8 applications thus have the opportunity to take advantage of Windows Azure as a cloud backend for their apps in order to store data, send messages or to authorize users. First, only Windows 8 is supported but Windows Phone, iOS and Android will follow.

With its Windows Azure Mobile Services Microsoft is not alone in the market of backend-as-a-service (BaaS). Vendors like Urban Airship, Parse or Kinvey are already there. The idea of ​​a BaaS is to help developers to focus mainly on the frontend of their application. All other topics that revolve around the backend does, and simplifies the service.

Windows Azure Mobile Services

After a basic configuration the data can be stored in the Azure Cloud and associated with the SQL database within Azure. Afterwards the apps can access the data without developers having to write additional code. In the background the Windows Azure mobile services rely on a REST API and JSON-based ODATA format. In addition, the service helps you create spreadsheets, data exploration and configuring the indices and access control. Furthermore, users can authenticate and send messages to the clients.

Compared to other BaaS providers Windows Azure mobile services also enable dashboard analytics capabilities that helps developers to monitor the use of the app, and other metrics.

SharePoint is another building block for enterprise customers

Recently Microsoft has announced the integration of SharePoint and Yammer. Today, users can already connect the two systems with Web Parts and the new Open Graph Yammer to an integrated solution. In addition, standard user profiles, document management functions and feed aggregation will ensure a closer alignment of both solutions in the future.

With „Microsoft Yammer Enterprise“ the various paid services are combined in one offer in the future. The user then pays three dollars per month, instead of the current 15 dollars. Also a closer link with Microsoft SharePoint Online and Office 365 Enterprise is planned.

Expansion of SharePoint functionality

Among the most important SharePoint enhancements belongs the new „drag and drop functionality“, so that documents can be quickly deployed via SharePoint. Also new is that tasks can be consolidate across Outlook, Project and SharePoint.

At the base of SharePoint, Microsoft has made ​​changes as well. With the result of improved scalability and performance, due to a new cloud architecture. The Web Content Management has now expanded and simplified cross-site publishing.

In addition, the development of the risk management enables IT departments in companies a better control over the distribution of documents across SharePoint, Exchange and Lync.

New Cloud App Model

In addition SharePoint 2013 features a new cloud application model in the future. Microsoft addressed thereby systematically over 700,000 developers who implement their applications based on SharePoint. The new cloud app model and the new Office store shall help them to simplify the development, purchase, roll-out and management of their applications.

Mobile apps provide access to documents and data

To give users the option to access documents and files from anywhere and with any device, they can use SharePoint Mobile apps in the future. Via different devices, Windows 8, Windows Phone, iOS and Android, they can access both SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online.

When we will see a Microsoft Cloudbook?

However, an interesting question still remains. Will Microsoft go maybe the Google way in the future? Is there may soon be a Chromebook counterpart from Microsoft? The browser is becoming the main work area. Furthermore more and more applications move to the cloud via SaaS. And not to forget, with the Windows Azure infrastructure Microsoft provides a fully developed and efficient cloud environment over which even Office 365 is deployed and also a „Microsoft Cloudbook“ can be readily supplied with applications, etc. With Windows Azure, Office 365 (Office 2013), SharePoint, Yammer, Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Skype, Windows Store, etc. Microsoft has created the necessary circumstances the recent months and years.

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Analysis

Lessons learned: Amazon EBS is the error-prone backbone of AWS

In a blog article awe.sm writes about their own experiences using the Amazon Web Services. Beside the good things of the cloud infrastructure for them and other startups you can also derived from the context that Amazon EBS is the single point of failure in Amazon’s infrastructure.

Problems with Amazon EC2

awe.sm criticized Amazon EC2’s constraints regarding performance and reliability on which you absolutely have to pay attention as a customer and should incorporate into your own planning. The biggest problem awe.sm is seeing in AWS zone-concept. The Amazon Web Services consist on several worldwide distributed „regions“. Within this regions Amazon divided in so called „availability zones“. These are independent data center. awe.sm mentions three things they have learned from this concept so far.

Virtual hardware does not last as long as real hardware

awe.sm uses AWS for about 3 years. Within this period, the maximum duration of a virtual machine was about 200 days. The probability that a machine goes in the state „retired“ after this period is very high. Furthermore Amazon’s „retirement process“ is unpredictable. Sometimes you’ll notify ten days in advance that a virtual machine is going to be shut down. Sometimes the retirement notification email arrives 2 hours after the machine has already failed. While it is relatively simple to start a new virtual machine you must be aware that it is also necessary to early use an automated deployment solution.

Use more than one availability zone and plan redundancy across zones

awe.sm made ​​the experience that rather an entire availability zone fails than a single virtual machine. That means for the planning of failure scenarios, having a master and a slave in the same zone is as useless as having no slave at all. In case the master failures, it is possibly because the availability zone is not available.

Use multiple regions

The US-EAST region is the most famous and also oldest and cheapest of all AWS regions worldwide. However, this area is also very prone to error. Examples were in April 2011, March 2012 and June 2012 (twice). awe.sm therefore believes that the frequent regions-wide instability is due to the same reason: Amazon EBS.

Confidence in Amazon EBS is gone

The Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is recommended by AWS to store all your data on it. This makes sense. If a virtual machine goes down the EBS volume can be connected to a new virtual machine without losing data. EBS volumes should also be used to save snapshots, backups of databases or operating systems on it. awe.sm sees some challenges in using EBS.

I/O rates of EBS volumes are bad

awe.sm made ​​the experiences that the I/O rates of EBS volumes in comparison to the local store on the virtual host (Ephemeral Storage) are significantly worse. Since EBS volumes are essentially network drives they also do not have a good performance. Meanwhile AWS provides Provisioned IOPS to give EBS volumes a higher performance. Because of the price they are too unattractive for awe.sm.

EBS fails at regional level and not per volume

awe.sm found two different types of behavior for EBS. Either all EBS volumes work or none! Two of the three AWS outages are due to problems with Amazon EBS. If your disaster recovery builds on top of moving EBS volumes around, but the downtime is due to an EBS failure, you have a problem. awe.sm had just been struggling with this problem many times.

The error status of EBS on Ubuntu is very serious

Since EBS volumes are disguised as block devices, this leads to problems in the Linux operating system. With it awe.sm made very bad experiences. A failing EBS volume causes an entire virtual machine to lock up, leaving it inaccessible and affecting even operations that don’t have any direct requirement of disk activity.

Many services of the Amazon Cloud rely on Amazon EBS

Because many other AWS services are built on EBS, they fail when EBS fails. These include e.g. Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), Relational Database Service (RDS) or Elastic Beanstalk. As awe.sm noticed EBS is nearly always the core of major outages at Amazon. If EBS fails and the traffic subsequently shall transfer to another region it’s not possible because the load balancer also runs on EBS. In addition, no new virtual machine can be started manually because the AWS Management Console also runs on EBS.

Comment

Reading the experiences of awe.sm I get the impression that Amazon do not live this so often propagandized „building blocks“ as it actually should. Even when it is primary about the offering of various cloud services (be able to use them independently), why let they depend the majority of these services from a single service (EBS) and with that create a single point of failure?

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Analysis

Cloud Computing: It is about agility and flexibility and secondarily about the costs

The German Computerwoche discussed in their article „How much is the Cloud“ the costs of cloud computing. In this case, the piece focuses on the topic of software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and does not consider the bandwidth of the cloud area. The general result of the article is, driving an on-premise solution for five years is cheaper than using cloud services in the same period. This conclusion is of course not surprising. Investing vigorously once and use my purchased resources over a very long period without renewing them I’m going definitely cheaper than using a SaaS model, where I pay monthly or annual contributions. But what is not noted, I always hang behind the current trends and above all never use the latest software versions. Because cloud computing is secondary about cost and primarily about the agility and flexibility a company wins with it.

Cloud Computing is necessarily not cheaper

The article includes some analysts statement e.g. from Gartner as well. Their conclusion is, that SaaS „… can be cheaper over the first five years of on-premise operations.“ Therefore, a long-term view and comparison of on-premise and cloud computing is recommended. This indicates that after a few years the break even is reached and then the on-premise solutions have significant cost advantages. Nicholas Krasser, Board member of Pentos AG, says: „The license costs in SaaS mode are from the sixth or seventh year definitely higher than the amortized cost of the on-premise licenses and servers and the ongoing operation.“

Mr. Krasser’s statement of course is right. As I mentioned above, it is a very simple calculation. If I initially invest a large sum in software licenses and let my employees working over six to seven years with outdated software versions, of course, I save in the long term. The situation is similar with hardware. But am I able to make my employees happy and productive with that strategy?

With a SaaS solution you invest on a monthly or yearly basis in the required software and of course at the same time you pay for innovation, updates, security fixes, new releases etc. That should not be forgotten. In addition, I get more flexibility to introduce a new SaaS solution quickly, without long-term investment in licenses.

Cloud computing makes the IT infrastructure more flexible

The foundation of cloud computing is the consolidation of hardware resources based on virtualization. This allows companies to reduce up to 40 percent of their total costs in the own data center. Singularly, 25 to 30 percent of these savings fall to the lower power consumption and investment for cooling systems. This allows the target of a „Green IT“ pursue as well. Traditional data centers had to be construed strongly over dimensioned to provide sufficient IT resources even during peak periods. Throughout the year but only 20 percent of this capacity is needed. The remaining 80 percent are unproductive.

Because of virtualization, the design of a data center is no longer sent to the maximum need of the anticipated demand. With the scalability of cloud computing, the resources are automated and flexible provided to the relevant business areas. Following the resources are shut down again. This operational efficiency leads to 30 percent cost savings.

In short, cloud computing can maximize the economies of scale and improve resource utilization of the entire IT infrastructure.

Cloud computing improves the agility of the entire company

Cloud Computing optimizes all technology processes and improves efficiency. It also reduces access to resources and increases the ability to innovate. Employees can access to information and applications more quickly, enabling them to analyze information summarily and immediately make decisions. A location-independent access to the data can also increase the productivity of each employee.

Cloud computing also ensures an optimized operation of the IT infrastructure, making it possible to compensate for peak times convenient and timely manner. Unexpected successful advertising campaigns, monthly and annual or seasonal influences may therefore be addressed without long term investments in costly hardware resources. The scalability of the cloud automatically (after manual configuration) adjusts the needed resources and provides them. This can be computing power, storage or applications.

It’s the same with the ability to innovate the enterprise. Any new initiative requires resources. Personnel as well as the supporting IT in the background. The cloud reduces the evaluation of new ideas and the time-to-market by the necessary IT resources are available on-demand.

Furthermore cloud computing promotes a better collaboration between employees and optimize the coordination with customers and partners. Within the company the cloud ensures a close integration of the employees as well as the processes and systems. This provides a more efficient collaboration. In the external communications with customers and partners the cloud is a platform that allows a seamless interaction.

Innovations must come to the foreground

IT is traditionally regarded as the drag of any business and it seems that this will not change in the era of cloud computing. A cost analysis is important and everyone who does it not makes a mistake. However, with cost-cutting you will not get a competitive advantage. To innovate you have to invest. Companies like Amazon (Amazon Web Services, Amazon Kindle) or Google have shown that impressively. With cloud computing the doors are open to any company also to increase the level of innovation and improve agility. And even the communication between employees, partners and customers can be optimized. Preferably startups and young companies that have built their business models based on the cloud and would not exist without these scalable infrastructures show how this works.

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Analysis

Cloud Computing is the backbone of the mobile world

The market of mobile devices and solutions is growing constantly. Recently the German BITKOM predicts a thriving tablet boom. Accordingly, more than 3.2 million units are sold in 2012. This is an increase of 52 percent. Sales are expected to rise to 1.6 billion euros. And also the trend towards mobile office and collaboration solutions has strengthened obviously.

The cloud is the backbone of mobile solutions

On a closer view it is clear that cloud computing is a guarantee of success for the mobile technology market and offers. The cloud allows providers such as Google (Google Play), Amazon (Kindle Android AppStore) and Microsoft (Windows Store) to deliver their customers the (for them actually-bringing added value) content such as books, music, apps, etc. anywhere and across devices. Unlike Apple, Google and Amazon have the strategy achieving its revenue mostly with content in particular and sell the needed devices at cost price. Also suppliers such as Samsung and LG recognized it and (plan to) have their own cloud offerings, to provide their customers with content or want to animate to store data and therefore want to lock them in.
But not only provider of mobile marketplaces use the cloud for their purposes. Even developers of mobile applications store their data more and more in the cloud instead locally.

Hybrid is the right strategic path

Wireless data connections continuing to develop rapidly but there are obviously still a lot of holes in the mobile (broadband) coverage. It is less about the inner cities, but the rural areas. Here are just still unstable or substandard connections (EDGE) available. And also the long-awaited high-speed standard LTE (Long Term Evolution) is not able meet the expectations or is overpriced for the masses.

Another point is reliability and trust while the mobile work. Ist the data respectively are the changes actually stored successfully or do I experience a surprise in the office? Especially when working in a moving train, it is strongly unadvisable working with pure cloud-based solutions.

Developers of mobile productivity solutions should therefore focus on a hybrid approach. The main work should take place on the mobile device. Any changes/ selected data is then in the event of a data connection synchronized in the background automatically (remember status messages). The ability to switch to an online or a cloud mode would be an option, for example to enable the real-time collaboration with colleagues.

No cloud, no fun.

Besides the development of mobile devices and operating systems such as Android, iOS and Windows Phone, the mobile market would not develop the way it is happening now without cloud computing. One the one hand the increase of powerful devices and more comfortable operating systems and apps are responsible for this progress. However, we should not forget that it is the cloud which created the possibilities for a seamless and device-independent access and synchronization of content.