The cloud is moving so quickly that you can be forgiven if you have trouble staying on top of everything you need to know. That's where Internet Evolution can help, with our upcoming 7 Days of Executive Education (7DEE): Getting Clued In to the Cloud.
7DEE is a seven-day free online course spread out over three weeks that will teach you what you need to know about deploying the cloud in your enterprise, including security, customization, public vs. private vs. hybrid, and more. It starts October 30 -- that's a week from now.
It starts with "Dispelling the Fog About Cloud Computing," where Daniel Kusnetzky, analyst and founder of the Kusnetzky Group, will fill you in on the fundamentals. We'll follow up two days later with "Getting Security Right in the Cloud," with Richard Stiennon, founder and chief research analyst at IT-Harvest. Then comes "The Perfect Fit: Tailoring Cloud Solutions to Suit Your Organization," with Douglas R. Thomas, president and CEO of HUB Business Support Services, a Long Island IT consulting firm. Tom Nolle, founder and president of CIMI Corp., will teach "Wringing Out Those Cloud Benefits," then Maria Korolov, president of Trombly International, will fill you in on "Public, Private & Hybrid Clouds." We'll wrap up with "What Infrastructure-as-a-Service Means to You," with H. Randy Cochran, founder and principal IT architect for Data Center Enhancements, Inc. And finally, Craig Sowell, vice president for IBM SmartCloud and managed services marketing at IBM, will point us to the future with "Where the Cloud is Taking Us." (IBM sponsors Internet Evolution.)
There are no attendance requirements. You can sit in on as many or as few classes as you like, participate as much or as little as makes sense for you. However, students who fulfill the complete course requirements will earn graduation. To graduate, you need to complete a minimum of four of the seven lectures, attending and posting at least five messages. Complete at least four of the seven lectures and you get a C, complete five and you get a B, and do all seven for an A.
All graduates receive a certificate signed by the Dean of 7DEE, a stylish "7D" pin, and get their grades published on their Internet Evolution profiles and recognized in our Role of Honor on the Internet Evolution site. For more information about graduation requirements, see here: 7 Days of Executive Education: How do I graduate?
Here's one report (from the earlier crash in Spring)
Thursday's crash happened at Amazon's northern Virginia data center, located in one of its East Coast availability zones. In its status log, Amazon said that a "networking event" caused a domino effect across other availability zones in that region, in which many of its storage volumes created new backups of themselves. That filled up Amazon's available storage capacity and prevented some sites from accessing their data.
So, yes, a "cascading effect". But wait -- isn't this the opposite of what a cloud should offer? It's supposed to create stability by propogating multiple instances across a wide array of hardware in multiple locations. Instead, this cloud propogated an error across multiple availability zones!
Well, it looks like the recommendation from Amazon was to spend more and put your app in multiple availability zones in different geographical areas:
"We always store data in multiple zones to avoid this problem," said Jeremy Edberg, senior product developer at Reddit. "The reason it went down is that it failed in multiple zones."
Sites like Quora and Reddit were able to come back online in "read-only" mode, but users couldn't post new content for many hours. Reddit only recently began inviting handfuls of random users to create new posts again.
Many experts blamed the sites themselves for crashing, saying they should have been spread out among multiple geographical regions to take full advantage of Amazon's backup systems.
jaballo - Amazon has multiple zones for different geographic regions. Enterprises using the cloud for extremely important apps are best off running them in multiple zones for redundancy.
Good question, jabailo. I wonder how many "nodes" there actually are. At Interop, recently, I was talking with a major builder of cloud storage centers, and when I asked how many they had, the answer was, like, three or four, and they're building another.
Okay, they're huge, but I was surprised that a big player had so few.
Great question for our expert, jabailo. The recent AWS outage shows the disconnect behind clouds in theory and clouds in practice. Not everyone is basing cloud services on the same techniques.
One thing I'm having trouble with is all the snafu's cropping up around Amazon's cloud, which is not only affect it's own services but taking down major customers as well.
The excuse always seems to stem from one central node in the Carolinas. But how can this be? I thought the definition of Cloud was to decouple the software infrastructure from the hardware, and be able to shift and move the whole thing around to servers worldwide. Thus having a single point of failure takes all the wind out of a cloud's sails.
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Catch up on the week with one simple serving of Friday File. We've pieced together 10 interesting news bites you may have missed and put them together in bite-size morsels.
I've been excited by a few technology announcements, and bored by many, but Google's I/O announcement this week is the first where I found myself getting choked up and teary.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Multi-tenant clouds assure security for clients, but not necessarily for their ideas. Here's one thing you should discuss with your cloud provider before you sign on.
All the recent hoopla about cloud security overlooks an important point, which is that it's not strictly a cloud problem. The linkage of online services into cooperative chains creates the risk, and only biometrics and federation of providers can save us.
Less than a year ago, we were debating whether private or public cloud would prevail. Private cloud now appears to be a clear favorite. The reason? Organizations of all sizes are getting comfortable with cloud, and vendors are providing solutions that make the adoption of private cloud straightforward and less risky.
65% of CIOs are on board with cloud, but 55% are still thinking about it. Risk is the major barrier to entry. Cloud purveyors can help to address this by providing turnkey cloud solutions targeted at specific vertical industry markets.
Security issues are all over the media today, along with condemnation of hackers who "create" them, but the sad truth is that only one enterprise in eight says it would submit to a public security audit. We need to get serious about this issue as we head into the cloud era.
Cloud services bring great benefits to IT, but they also force revisions to IT practices. One area where cloud services are having an impact is disaster recovery and business continuation.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
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