Digital Walkabout

Does the latest Amazon outage make you nervous?

Amazon's public cloud outage last week wasn't the worst in the company's history, but that and other recent cloud services interruptions give IT professionals who aren't ready to make a commitment to the cloud reason to continue their resistance.

In the meantime, cloud customers need to take more responsibility for their own uptime, said one long-time Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer.

"Downtime is lost revenue, and every level of the company needs to take responsibility for emergency preparedness," said Colin Dean, president of the Pittsburgh LAN Coalition, a group that organizes video gaming events.

"Any time a company decides to use a cloud service, they absolutely must assess the risk an outage poses to their business," Dean said. Although he was not affected by the outage, Dean's critical systems are set up to fall back on local disks or to another cloud service.

Last week's outage took down a single Availability Zone in Amazon's data center in northern Virginia, which supports the US-EAST-1 region. However, the outage, which was triggered by a power failure that the company did not elaborate on, affected a disproportionate number of customers because that data center is AWS's largest and its oldest.

A list of customers who were without service for several hours late last Thursday and into the early morning hours of Friday was not available. However, Heroku, a division of Salesforce.com, was affected. Heroku, which is one of the largest Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers, runs on AWS.

A Heroku official said the company is still investigating the outage but had no further comment. A more severe AWS outage in April 2011 that went on for days also hit the PaaS provider.  

That may have helped inoculate some customers against heightened paranoia caused by this latest outage, said one analyst.

"This is a rehash of earlier outages in terms of the fallout … it's loud and sometimes histrionic, but ultimately, [it’s] not going to make a dent in either Amazon's reputation or their customer uptake," said Carl Brooks, analyst for infrastructure and cloud computing at Tier1 Research, a division of New York City-based 451 Research LLC.

Still, there are IT factions that see these outages as an opportunity to retake lost territory in the data center.

"Outages are going to happen ... that said, it will serve to reinforce the stereotypes of cloud computing among the irredentist enterprise faction that is feeling threatened by the trends toward external IT services," Brooks added.

In fact, failures like those at AWS, as well as Microsoft's Windows Azure outage in February, continue to provide cover for some IT managers opposed to risking processing and data to the cloud.

For IT departments looking for excuses to delay public cloud adoption, this incident might reinforce their argument, said one New York-based cloud computing consultant  with extensive experience with AWS.

Oracle continues to fumble with Cloud

Oracle’s latest public cloud vision continues the company’s lock-in approach that leaves experts skeptical, if not outright cynical about the company’s cloud strategy.

Oracle Corp.’s cloud platform was re-introduced by CEO Larry Ellison during an hour-and-a-half presentation last week where he appeared to laboriously read off of slides and largely rehashed last fall's launch of the company’s cloud initiative.

Given that the Oracle Cloud remains highly proprietary, it’s no surprise that it primarily appeals to existing Oracle customers. Non-Oracle shops don't see value in the cloud offering and wonder why the company would take such an approach.

"The reality is that the era of vendors that want to control the market is long gone," said Nigel Fortlage, vice president of IT for customs broker and trade consultancy GHY International, based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. "We partner with IBM because they let us pick and choose."

"I don't see Oracle as a valid solution," he added.

Though pricing has not yet been revealed, it will be based on a subscription model instead of the typical pay-as-you-go model of other cloud services. That sets off alarms for some observers who see its higher-end pricing as undercutting one of cloud computing's chief tenets -- lower IT costs.

"From a business standpoint, I can't imagine why I'd want to [use Oracle Cloud]. ... Everything is overpriced in order to pay the company's sales people," said Roger Jennings, a Windows Azure MVP and developer in Oakland, Calif.

Ellison and Oracle co-president Mark Hurd were also unclear about when various components of the company's cloud services will be actually available, with press materials saying one thing and other company statements online saying another.

For instance, a company FAQ states that two offerings -- Oracle Fusion CRM Cloud Service and Oracle Fusion HCM Cloud Service -- are "currently available," while Oracle Database, Oracle Java Cloud Service and Oracle Social Network are available under "preview availability."

Further, a blog post by Oracle's senior vice president of communications touted the "general availability of Oracle Cloud." 

However, an online registration page says that Oracle "will be provisioning Java and Database services in batches over the next several months [and that] Fusion Application services will be made available shortly after that."

Such confusion doesn't help boost confidence in the company's entry into the cloud computing arena.

Oracle's poor reputation mirrors another IT veteran's history in cloud -- but will its future turn out the same?

"People laughed when Microsoft announced entry into the cloud business, questioning the company's track record at running highly available services," said Shlomo Swidler, CEO of Orchestratus Inc., a cloud computing consultancy in West Hempstead, N.Y.

"Will organizations trust their business processes to Oracle's operations team the way they already trust their data to Oracle's development and support team?" Swidler said.

Some customers, who already have significant investments in Oracle products, likely will go for Oracle Cloud, said Charles King, principal analyst at corporate advisory firm Pund-IT, Inc. in Hayward, Calif.

"Once a solution grows roots in a data center, it's harder than heck to get it pulled out," King added. "I'm sure there will be Oracle customers that will be cheering hosannas of praise."