So – first things first, everyone is going on and on about the AWS outage last week. Here’s my short 2 cents on it:
- People who say “hey see, public cloud availability is not ‘enterprise ready’!” IMO are being alarmist, and are off base. For years, many traditional enterprise apps (sadly) dream of the overall availability that many of the cloud services have exhibited for years now.
- It highlighted that you need to know what you’re doing when using these public cloud services – just because it’s a public cloud doesn’t absolve you from that Arguably, the app-side folks need to know more (they have to build in app-level resiliency as a core part of their design). If apps were written to have app-level resiliency and leverage multiple AWS availability zones, they would have been OK.
- That many people whose use cases demand more (more availability/recoverability/compliance) really weren’t thinking enough. Man, I HOPE that this thread on the AWS support forums is a gag. If not, it’s really scary. https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=241597
I will make one critical statement though – it highlights why I believe the EMC/VMware view of cloud – that being able to federate in and out is VERY important (along with the ability to attest to trust/compliance in the cloud).
My point here is that Amazon going down isn’t the main thing (again, if you had a well-designed app, and planned for the architectural model of AWS, you would have been fine). But, lets say that it dragged on and on, or multiple availability zones started to fail, or Amazon had a huge breach – or heck, even when out of business (unlikely – but could happen to us all) – if switching is virtually impossible (due to API lockin, app-dev lockin, or the huge problem of getting massive amounts of data out) – now THAT’S a scary proposition…
That’s why I think all the vendor community working towards portability (at every layer), and technologies to make workload and data federation easier is very, very important. None of us are perfect – but this case really does highlight where that potential “Hotel California” effect Paul Maritz always talks about could become very, very bad.
Switching gears…
EMC World is right around the corner. If you haven’t registered yet, there’s something wrong with you :-)
So – the hands-on-labs (vLabs) is becoming epic. This will be very, very cool – check out the link here for details. At the link you can see a list of all the on-demand labs we will offer, and there is a picture as we stage everything. All powered by the EMC Demo Cloud. A big shout out to the team (which spans all of EMC) who is working so hard to make it happen.
To give you an idea of how epic this will be, here’s a shot of our much, much smaller PLAN B.
The biggest risk for us will be a telecom failure – as all the HoL will be literally powered out of our Demo Cloud which is in RTP. These travel half-racks have VNXes and UCS C-series rack-mount systems which at a moment’s notice SHOULD be able to jump in if things go horribly awry. But then again, the risk of a “no net” environment is half the fun :-)
Speaking of “no net” – Chad’s World Live is coming along – will have some very cool demos, and a bunch of customers on stage. Of course, there are some bits we’re trying to “gag up a bit”. Here’s a shot of Wade and I crashing Joe Tucci’s office…
And then inevitably getting kicked out by Pam :-)…
Make sure you register! EMC World is going to be a gas!



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