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Disgusting: Amazon treats people like virtual machines – the human cloud

This article is not directly about cloud computing, but if I look at the whole issue I see many similarities with the concept of the Amazon Web Services. Beyond that it makes me very angry, how a company like Amazon treats its employees – notabene HUMANS.

Background

A recently published documentary by the ARD (video) has revealed the inhuman machinations of the world’s biggest retailer Amazon with temporary workers in Germany. That the working conditions in the Amazon logistics centers are generally described as very poor is no secret, there have been several reports about it. But what this report reveals is among all human dignity, for which all stakeholders including Amazon itself must be held publicly accountable.

The report reveals that the success of Amazon is generated on the back of temporary workers that must „live“ under worst conditions, and this here in the middle of Germany. Therefore the corporation collects Europe-wide contract workers and accommodate them in unused holiday villages. Amazon uses subcontractors e.g. for the recruitment and the „security“ of the temporary workers. In totally overcrowded buses, employees are brought into the distribution centers. If they come to late to the shiftwork – even without their own fault – they paid less. The documentary shows how a company like Amazon „… must bring along 5,000 people for three months and then get rid of.“

Amazon treats contract workers like virtual machines

In order to get a little curve to the cloud, I see so many parallels between the disregard of human dignity through Amazon and the cloud computing concept as it operates by the Amazon Web Services. Simply swap the term „virtual machine“ to the word „human„.

Amazon requires, as the report good describes, „humans on demand“ and let them work through 15 days in a row. Amazon transfers the concept of the cloud, so the principles of „on demand“ and „pay per use“ in its retail business and in the logistics centers, and thus creates its „human cloud“. It is a very good analog example for the technical situation of the webshop during the Christmas season. Meanwhile, excessive resources for computing power are needed to keep the shop stable because of the high requests. The situation is similar in the logistics centers. If the requests at the webshop increase, the commissions are need to approved, accepted and prepared for shipment. If the requests decline, even in the warehouses less is going on. Accordingly, fewer people are needed, which are then no longer need to be paid. An example of an Amazon headman of the logistics center in Koblenz: „3300 employees work here, 3100 of them are temporary.“

Theoretically a nice idea Amazon, but that does not work! You can not boot up humans like virtual machines and then dispose them when they are no longer needed!

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Is the channel in the cloud computing age still relevant?

During the Cloud EcoSystem Winter Meeting a panel discussed which relevants the channel still has in the cloud. Since the majority of the participants were part of the channel less critics were made. And even things about changes were not discussed, because some already delivered software over ASP and so they are since 1998 in the cloud.

ASP is not cloud computing

I will not discuss ASP (Application Service Providing) vs. SaaS (cloud). That ASP has nothing todo with SaaS (software-as-a-service) respectively cloud computing is not just propagade by me but also by other publications. (Btw, I was very thankful, that Stefan Ried cleaned up all the „cloud myths“ during his talk and showed all attendees the true characteristics and benefits of the cloud, thanks Stefan!)

The channel have to change

Let’s come to the channel. It will be worse to say that it dies. On the one hand „something“ is to sale everytime and the lobby behind that will do their best to keep this business model alive. But it will be worse to close the eyes and making things going on as they have been made for years. Sure, „You’ll always need hardware!“ but even this amount? And are countless suppliers able to live just from selling hardware?

In my opinion, software reselling, a big part of the whole market, is dead. Just think about which type of software is shipped by media, I spontaneously just have operating systems in mind. Although it’s possible to download it from the website of the vendor as well. Just like other software which is not available as SaaS today. For example, Microsoft ships the new Office 365 Home Premium in a box with just a small card with a code on it. The software is downloaded or streamed afterwards from a Microsoft website.

From reseller to integrator

In my opinion the typical channel for software reseller is too late to save. Companies in this area should as soon as possible think about other options. One possibility is a partnership program with software vendors, to help customers migrate and integrate with consultation-intensive solutions (actually SaaS applications are intuitv to configure and use). That means, a software reseller needs to have more expertise than just sell software and become a systems integrator.

A further idea is to build an own marketplace for SaaS applications. Here the differentiation with existing offerings is necessary and besides offering solutions from different categories even integrate them (by standard) in order to have a central data management and no isolated solutions. Here you can see, that the reseller also becomes an integrator. Leaving just reselling software.

Sure, there are software reseller who even integrate. The classical systems houses. But even these needs to change, thanks to the cloud.

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Office 365 Home Premium – Microsoft does not rely on software-as-a-service

Yesterday Microsoft has introduced its new Office for the retail market. The new Office 365 Home Premium promises to deliver new capabilities for direct connection to social networks, SkyDrive and Skype to facilitate communication with family and friends. In addition, each user has his personal office anywhere. Use it on a PC, tablet or smartphone – and even on the Mac. The control is done in addition to keyboard by touch or pen input. But who thought that Microsoft offers its new office to the idea of the cloud as SaaS (software-as-a-service), is mistaken.

Cloud but not software-as-a-service

Office 365 Home Premium is not SaaS or a cloud service in the strict sense, because the office is not provided or used over the browser. (Although there are the completely free Office Web Apps, which have directly nothing to do with Office 365 Home Premium.) Microsoft gives the reason that not all Office functions can be operated performant in the browser. Instead, Microsoft is going an „interesting“ way which is totally new. Microsoft Office becomes hybrid. Microsoft names this truly innovative technology as „Office streaming“. Through „Click 2 Run“ an office suite can be installed in minutes. The interesting thing is that Microsoft initially installed the statistically most used basic functions, so you can quickly start working with Office. So you are able to work with Office already during the installation. In the background the rest is installed. The cluo: If a function is called, for example of Word, while Office is still in installation mode, this function is prioritized accurately and directly streamed. (Whether this type of installation, a user really needs is another question, but the idea is good.)

Cloud is just in the backend

Office 365 Home Premium syncs all personal settings and documents automatically to the cloud. Thus all data are available on all connected PCs. This also works on other PCs, if you log on there with a Microsoft account of hotmail.com, outlook.com or live.com. Based on the new technology „Office on Demand“ the office is then streamed from the cloud for processing on the respective computer. „Office on Demand“ installs Office on the local system in a virtual environment. When the session is closed, the virtual environment and the Office with all the data completely disappears from the system. Thus, Microsoft would ensure privacy when using on other computers.

Prices and goodies

Office 365 Home Premium includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and also Outlook, Access and Publisher. By subscribing a user automatically has to have the latest Office solution on the hard drive or on the road via“Office on Demand“. Other goodies: 60 minutes per month with Skype to landlines, additional 20 GB SkyDrive storage and use rights for up to five devices, laptops, tablets and smartphones, for both Windows and Mac environments.

Prices

  • Office 365 Home Premium: 99 EUR per year
  • Office 365 University: 79 EUR for 4 years
  • Office Home & Student 2013 for 139 EUR
  • Office Home & Business 2013 for 269 EUR
  • Office Professional 2013 for 539 EUR

Office 365-Business

From 27 February 2013 also new Office 365 business services with new functions will be available, which will probably also include a SkyDrive Pro version.

The strategy is consistent with Windows 8

That Microsoft does not rely on SaaS is a little surprising, but it fits into the Windows 8 strategy. The applications are mostly held locally to ensure the speed and necessarily not have to rely on a data connection. All personal settings and documents, if the user wants, are stored in the cloud in order to ensure the location and platform independent access. This is ensured by „Office on Demand“ and streaming.

Is the Microsoft Office suite still contemporary?

For me, the question arises, why Microsoft continued its commitment to this massive office suite and does not offer applications separately. I understand the strategy to give end users access to Outlook. Parents can e.g. organize the family. But who does that really? After Microsoft’s research probably some. So, reference customers were allowed to talk about their use cases during the launch event. I’m not so sure. If you look at the behavior of (young) users, who prefer to self assemble their productivity suite and do not want to get dictated by mom and dad. (The influence of their friends is much greater.) Dropbox for storage, Evernote for taking notes, Remember the Milk or Wunderlist for tasks, GMail or Outlook.com for e-mail are among the favorite candidates. The Cloud and Mobile apps make it possible.

Office is good, no question! But is this powerful solution still contemporary? Do users really want to get dictated what they should use or do they prefer to assemble their own solutions. Word and Excel are an added value for each personal productivity suite, but for that they must be offered separately, and I do not mean the Office Web Apps.

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The local operating system dies, long live the cloud desktop

Regarding the Post-PC era, the accompanying changes in the operating system market are not solely attributable to mobile devices. For some time, there are solutions that can represent an operating system in a browser or systems that make full-featured local systems obsolete. For example, mainframes, terminal servers and thin clients. This topic I discussed in the last year with the article. „Zurück in die Cloud: Terminals und Mainframes bekommen ihr Update 2.0“ Also, Remote Desktop sessions are long-established ways for remote access. Projecting all these technologies into the present, we arrive at one of the next big trends in the IT business environment, the cloud desktop.

A desktop from the cloud

Not only in terms of location-independence and collaborate on projects is the cloud desktop a logical step and goes far beyond cloud storage services with value-added services for the parallel work on documents and other data. Cloud desktops or Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) are among the top issues for a company’s IT and eventually replace the „Virtual Desktop Infrastructure„. One can also say that cloud desktops respectively DaaS is the consistent further development of the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

The ongoing development of cloud computing makes cloud desktops to an optimum platform for the enterprise. Cloud desktops allow the complete outsourcing of the desktop environment to a provider. The billing based on the needs. Afterwards the cloud desktop provider is responsible for the delivery and maintenance of the environment. These include inter alia to install updates, and upgrades, backup and providing storage space. Based on the spin-off to a single vendor, the cloud desktop can be accessed regardless of the geographic location, the structure of the company and the respective terminal.

Everything always and everywhere

Cloud desktops form complete work environments, as we know from the local desktop. Unlike ordinary cloud storage offerings here all the necessary applications for the location-independent work are available. The desktop is completely mobile, which is for employees working from home and in the field an advantage. Cloud desktops are the ideal solution when the underlying infrastructure is not necessary. Through the use of cloud desktops the company’s IT no longer needs to face with the purchase, installation and the additional topics that belong to the operation and maintenance of a desktop environment. Furthermore, the worldwide deployment of systems and software solutions to the employees is simplified.

Benefits and concerns

The benefits of cloud desktops are inter alia in the reduction of spending on hardware and maintenance plus the monthly flexibility as needed. Furthermore, the staff have the opportunity to access their work environment at any time and from any place. For this purpose, these virtualized desktops can be accessed from the corporate network, the Internet and on many platforms such as tablets, smartphones, thin clients and classic devices like laptops or desktop PCs.

Before using a cloud desktop environment, there are also a few things to note. One part is the provider and whether the offer meets your requirements. Furthermore, the themes service levels, safety, and laws and regulations have a great importance. But even how it looks to integrate with existing backend systems or already deployed software-as-a-service solutions. A not to be underestimated area is also the availability of a stable data connection. Because: „No cloud, no cookies.“

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Value added services are the future of infrastructure-as-a-service

The title of this article may confuse a bit. After all, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) are services already. But I have my reasons. From the beginning, in its Magic Quadrant Gartner identifies the Amazon Web Services as the leading provider of the IaaS market. However, whom I miss in it is Windows Azure. But why is it just Amazon, which lead the market and why do Windows Azure in my opinion also belongs in the same quadrant as Amazon.

Early presence and a strong offer pay off

One reason for Amazon’s success is undisputed in the early presence in the market. As the first IaaS provider (2006), they have shaped the market and thus sets the direction of cloud computing, an important influence on many providers. Microsoft followed with Windows Azure relatively late (2010), but has expanded its portfolio quickly.

A further but much more concise reason are the services of both providers. As with the other IaaS providers in the market, for Amazon AWS and Microsoft Windows Azure pure infrastructure is not in the foreground, but rather solutions around it. The service portfolio of both providers compared to the rest of the market is very strong and offers much more than just virtual servers and storage. And that’s the sticking point.

Make the infrastructure usable

The core of IaaS is offering computing power, storage and network capacity as a service, based on the pay as you go model. Most cloud providers in the market heed that. But not Amazon AWS and Windows Azure. Both offer many value-added services around their infrastructure and make them so useful. With it customers are able to use the „dumb“ infrastructure directly productive.

No matter which provider from the public cloud area to start on, usually the offer is compute, storage and database. One or the other offer a CDN (Content Delivery Network), and tools for monitoring in addition. That’s all! However, a look at the services of Amazon AWS and Windows Azure shows, how extensive their portfolio is by this time.

Value added services are the key and the future of infrastructure-as-a-service, with them the infrastructure can be use more profitable.

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Oracle pushes its cloud-washing bravely ahead

Oracle continues to work on its cloud-washing strategy and drives it forward despite vehement criticism. Under the name „infrastructure as a service on premise with capacity on demand“ Oracle offers enterprises its hardware to rent for the own data center.

Preconfigured applicationserver

Oracle is expanding its private cloud infrastructure to offer the opportunity to rent preconfigured application servers for a monthly fee, which will be installed in the client’s data center. The by Oracle named „engineered systems“ include Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Sparc SuperCluster, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and Oracle Sun ZFS Storage.

The idea is that Oracle provides extra capacity that go beyond the already used resources of an Oracle private cloud. Exactly this Oracle called infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which has nothing to do with an IaaS cloud offering but ordinary Oracle data center solutions.

A three-year contract is not cloud!

Just as little the „Oracle Cloud Infrastructure“ is a true cloud offering, it looks with the new „Oracle IaaS on-premise“. The three-year contract includes only the hardware for the application server, maintenance and a certain amount of usage. The use of Oracle software licenses result in additional costs. Furthermore you have to pay for so called „peaks“. What this exactly is and what the cost are is not stated.

Oracle loses pace

Unfortunately, it is increasingly clear how Oracle wants to sell his philosophy of cloud computing to the market. They simply take their hardware, software, etc. which were previously expensively sold, and now rents them as „cloud“!

It seems Oracle tries everything to keep pace with the cloud market. But they do not have the right strategy. The real public cloud providers, especially Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, Google and Rackspace will increasingly outstrip Oracle. But, on the private cloud side it looks not better for Oracle. Here providers like openQRM-Enterprise, Eucalyptus, OpenStack-Partner and CloudStack get more and more market share.

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Failures in the cloud are in the nature of man

If the cloud falls it has to do with the people who are responsible for it. How could it be otherwise. Finally, the systems do not program or configure on their own. And even if it means „No cloud without automation“ you have to say „(No cloud without automation) without human skills“. In particular, we see our human weaknesses in the cloud when an outage occurs. Especially this year, we have seen a few of them.

People make mistakes

And that’s ok. As long as we are learning from those mistakes. What at one or the other vendors was not the case this year. I will not mention any names here, because those certainly know itself that they need to do something much better. But if an emergency generator does not work twice and also all emergency plans fail, something is wrong!
Although this failure, I am writing about, was not primarily a human error. Because against a hurricane and storm we are helpless. But the cascade of failures that happened during the storm is inexplicable.

Other errors that have happened this year, can be assigned directly to the people. On the one hand we had for example misconfigured network interfaces which ensure that the vendor networks were flooded with data and have therefore set themselves checkmate. Or a provider recently changes the configuration of the load balancer, which led to a prolonged outage.

Like I said, people make mistakes. And therefore one should not always blame „the big bad cloud“, but rather look behind the facade and keep in mind that there are just sitting humans like you and I.

Along these lines, let’s have a better 2013. 🙂

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CIOs are irritated by false cloud services and their marketing

It is not a surprising result and shows that cloudwasher are the biggest losers. Because CIOs do not want to be mislead from false cloud services. This is a result of a survey by cloud provider ElasticHosts under several CIOs worldwide.

83 percent of CIOs are irritated by false cloud marketing

The survey resulted in that 83 percent of CIOs are frustrated to need to deal constantly with the false marketing of the self-proclaimed cloud services which turn out to being quite traditional hosting solutions in the end. Ordinary web hosting solutions that include the name of cloud on it: cloud-washing!

Two-thirds (67 percent) of the respondents said, that they already got the offering of „cloud“ services with a fixed term. 40 percent report offers without elasticity or scalability and 32 percent of the offerings do not have a self-service.

Webhosting is NOT Cloudhosting!

It is no longer a secret that most of the offerings which use the term „cloud“ or „cloud computing“ in their name are only reissued standard hosting solutions that do not have a single core feature of cloud computing. What means, it e.g. does not have a self-service, no automatic provision of resources, no flexibility or scalability nor a pay as you go model.

Something must be done!

The survey shows again that it is time to do something and that cloudwasher must be made public for their lies. Because on the one hand false cloud services cost IT buyers much time. On top of that a „fake cloud“ is still used at some point for a project and can lead to serious consequences for the client and hinders real cloud offerings.

As David Linthicum wrote:

Truth be told, most of those presentations are given by salespeople who don’t know a cloud from a hole in the ground; they actually believe they’re selling is a cloud. Used cars, appliances, PCs, cloud services — the sales process is all the same, right?

Word!, hm?

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Fragmented: Forrester cloud computing predictions for 2013

Like many other big analyst firms, Forrester Research looked in their very own glass ball and made predictions for the cloud computing market in 2013 which will actually reach. From this ten predictions I took three and highlights them from my perspective.

Cloud and mobile will become one

What’s the value of a mobile app that doesn’t call out through the Internet to back-end services? Not much. And where will these back-end services live? Probably not in your datacenter — unless you plan to poke a big hole in your firewall to accommodate an unpredictable flood of traffic. More often than not, we are finding mobile applications connected to cloud-based back-end services (increasingly to commercial mobile-back-ends-as-a-service) that can elastically respond to mobile client engagements and shield your data center from this traffic. Nearly every software-as-a-service (SaaS) application has a mobile client now, which is proof of the model as well. As Forrester analyst Glenn O’Donnell puts it, cloud plus mobile is a classic “more than the sum of its parts” combination.

On this I have to disagree because this prediction has already occurred. Having a look on mobile apps on iOS, Android or Windows Phone, we quickly see that, instead stored on the local device, most of the data are already are strored on servers in the internet and downloaded on demand. Well-known examples are Foursquare, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Analytics Tools, Instagram, Evernote (hybrid), etc.

More on the issue at „The Mobile Cloud is the real mega-trend„, actually written in German in March 2011.

We’ll stop stressing about cloud SLAs

And recognize that apps have to protect themselves. The best practice for cloud application design and configuration is to build resiliency into the application rather than expect it from the cloud platform. This way you can achieve any service-level agreement regardless of the base SLA provided by the cloud platform. Getting the performance you need is an application-specific goal anyway. What’s the value of having your sourcing and vendor management team negotiate a high and tight SLA from the cloud vendor when only 10% of the applications deployed there need that level of protection?

The name for this is „design for failure“, because „everything fails everytime“, of course cloud infrastructures as well. Cloud computing per se delivers no high-availability for the customer. But it gives the ways and means to reach high-availability. Especially in the field of infrastructure-as-a-service you have to look on the horizontal scalability characteristics of a cloud infrastructure to design the applications and systems as available as possible. That means not to use just one server. Instead you should use several servers and distribute them over various availability zones (datacenter) and regions (global distribution). As a cloud-architect you have to avail oneself to the scalability of the cloud and therefore design the application for distributed infrastructures. It also means that a server has to start automatically if the load growth and shutted down as well when it is no longer needed.

However, regarding SLAs we should keep the providers in mind. The service level must be correct and complied with. In my view, the „pain“ for the providers is not large enough when something happens. „Only“ reimburse the costs, which were charged during the period of the outage, is not enough.

We’ll stop equating cloud with AWS

While Amazon Web Services has opened up a substantial lead in the cloud platforms market — arguably as large as 70% market share — in 2013 we’ll see that market position give way to a cadre of strengthening competitors and new entrants. Microsoft and Google have made significant improvements to their platforms, and by the end of 2013 we fully expect to see at least three substantial OpenStack-based clouds building strong positions. Look for a Forrester Wave™ of public cloud platforms in mid-2013.

The strongest competitor to Amazon Web Services are, as Forrester says correctly, Microsoft Windows Azure and the Google Cloud Platform. All others have to catch massively, because most of them just(!) offering infrastructure. Amazon has done a lot to build value-added services around the AWS infrastructure, which customers can profitable use to utilize the „stupid“ infrastructure. It’s the same with Microsoft and Google. Other public cloud providers on the other hand have only computing power and storage, that’s it. Some talk a lot about that they have a new IaaS (quasi a next generation IaaS), but behind is just still stupid infrastructure a customer can not do much so far.

A good approach for a next generation IaaS will be a convenient IaaS like a Infrastructure-as-a-Platform. Because IaaS like AWS are really difficult to understand and therefore to use.

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"Variable cloud contracts" Please What?

I’ve found an interview in the German CIO magazine with the title „We need variable cloud contracts„. Please what? Variable cloud contracts? These are three words which together don’t make sense and show that the cloud computing concept somehow has not arrived yet or, and this will be very awkward, the providers wrongly advised.

Fragmented: „Variable cloud contracts“

Let us disassemble this word-mesh and image it to the generally principles of cloud computing we have the following result:

Variable

Cloud computing is inherently variable. Even more variable than any form of outsourcing we have seen in the history of information technology. And that regarding on the time of use and as well as the accounting. See next item.

Cloud

Resumed in a nutshell cloud (computing) means the flexible (variable) on demand use of (IT)-resources over a data link, preferential the Internet.

Flexible respectively variable means for a customer obtaining the resources, use them and „give them back“ when he wants (on demand). Beyond that the customer just pay for the resources he used within this period and which resources he truly used (pay as you go).

So, highly variable!

Contracts

In classical thought, there are no „real“ contracts within cloud computing as we normally know. In the public cloud you just need a credit card. Of course you have a kind of a contract, but this is or should be designed by the providers side, so that you as a customer will receive the maximum of flexibility. That means that the accounting ensued e.g. per hour and no monthly or even annually contract is signed. If the infrastructure of the provider is no longer needed after a certain time the settlement ends.

The tangible statement

The statement in the interview reads as follows:

„Cloud computing is a trend you have to use. Essential for us is the contractual implementation. What the cloud does, is the quick usability of IT services and the availability is separated from the company. But it will be only interesting for us, if all relevant safety requirements are met, if you can switch from one provider to another and the contracts can be designed variably. This means concretely the related resources have to be adapted within 24 hours of both upward and downward.“

In particular the last (marked in bold) part is worrying!

„… if you can switch from one provider to another and the contracts can be designed variably. This means concretely the related resources have to be adapted within 24 hours of both upward and downward.“

This statement shows to me on the one hand, that the view of the market is missing. Because there are already enough (real) cloud computing providers where exactly this demand is possible. Mentioned here for example Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure or CloudSigma. On the other hand, this also means that so many providers continue to play a double game and define cloud computing by their own rules and so confuse the customers.