Concerns about The Cloud March 26, 2012
Posted by Duncan in Strategy.trackback
Those of you that know me will be aware that I’m very ‘pro cloud’. We (Succeed) run many PeopleSoft instances there, and some other things besides. We develop, monitor and automate in there also. That doesn’t mean that I’m blind to its flaws though.
This was brought home to me by the recent outage in Microsoft’s Azure platform. For those that didn’t hear, Azure (Microsoft’s cloud platform) went down on 29th February and many people lost access until well into the next day. This isn’t a service we use (we’re with Amazon – by far and away the market leader) but it’s certainly a warning shot. AWS itself had problems in one of its regions not so long ago too. Losing access is one thing, but losing data is quite another. Although I’m not aware of any instances of this happening yet it’s only a matter of time (and a company with the wealth of experience of MS still struggling with leap years shows that the cloud is a brave new world and still has some maturing to do).
Overall our experience has been overwhelmingly positive – and of course outages are still possible on-premise too – just don’t think that because you’ve moved to an enterprise size cloud provider (or even one of the smaller, newer ‘niche’ providers) that you’re immune from things going awry.
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Couldn’t agree more with you! This also highlights the need for putting one’s IT eggs in multiple cloud baskets and that is where a universal/standardized cloud offering is going to be key (maybe in a few years if we’re lucky!)
How has your experienced been with the AWS? Do you use it only for demo environments or for the SLDC for the clients? If so, do you guys use a VPC/VPN pipe from Client site to AWS? Or just directly host at AWS?
Also, how has your experience been with using the Oracle AMI’s? Worth the cost? Useless? Too Old?
Adding to this question by amrmalik, just wanted to know the percentage of your clients that have gone for the cloud offering.
And finally Amazon goes down!
It was last Friday. More about the news on the Forbes website: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/06/30/amazon-cloud-goes-down-friday-night-taking-netflix-instagram-and-pinterest-with-it/
There seem to have been a few outages over the last couple of weeks. First Salesforce goes down for a few days, then one of Amazon’s regions goes down too (the storms also took out the power for 2million people living in the same city). If clients had planned for resilience and spread their estate over more than one region (as per AMS best practises) they’d have less issues.
Hi Tipster, as a consulting ps developer, who would you recommend me installing a local version of ps on my laptop or use a Cloud service such as amazon,,,this would be mainly to code, test and build upon my skillset.
A local install seems so cumbersome unless one has ps admin skills but I’m sure amazon would charge a monthly service fee. Also, any idea where i can find someone who I could pay to do the local install?
Thanks,
Ricky.
If you work at a client with access to Oracle Support you might be in luck if you’re prepared to wait a couple of months. PeopleTools 8.53 changes how updates will be delivered and in the very near future you’ll be able to download complete virtual box instances with the latest app and tools patches. That should save you a lot of effort if you want a local install.
Alternatively, installing it in AWS isn’t a bad idea either as you can just leave it shutdown until you need it, saving a fair amount of money too.