#Amazon EC 2 #Cloud Easter Crash

A sad weekend for all cloud users. With the 21. April 2011 noon the cloud lost its innocence. A lot of trust that was given to Amazon for the EC2 Service swept away in only few hours.

It took Amazon about 3 days to recover the services hosted in their data center in Virgina (us-east-1c). Means a lot of services of Amazons customers were not running partly the whole 3 days. In some cases it had bad follow-up.  As one customer runs the monitoring of heart patients in amazon cloud. This examples shows how wrong the decisions could be made, when choosing data for the cloud. Here it was irresponsible, and Amazon did not show a good reaction in not answering the contacting tries of this customer. Even when they had the time to answer a question if the error was caused by skynet. Skynet is a fictional company from the movie terminator.

I wonder what took so much time that amazon lost a complete data center for 3 days. I hope we will see a detail analyze on that events and actions was taken. It seems to be too early to finish the lessons learned session on it. But i would say that this weekend will be a historical moment in cloud history. And we will not remember it in a good manner.

If you like to follow the actual status of your machines then see Amazons EC Status Page.

Update:

There was a data loss. In sum 11 hours of data are missing and will not be restoreable. But i am sure that these involved companies had backups of their data. Or not?

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-lost-data-2011-4

Azure Storage Membership Provider

A helpful Project that i found as brandnew (I got the very second  Download) providing what i was searching for. It saves me some hours of work.

Use it as template when you need simple storage Account Membership providers for a Webpage on Azure.

Download and Import it to Visual Studio, run it. Ready.

The rest is adaption.

http://meronymy.blogspot.com/2011/03/azure-membership-role-and-profile.html

Thanks to Inge Henriksen from Scandinavia.

 

Proudly announced

New Blog

Sebastian Gerling, Vincent Rothländer and Dirk Hartwig started thier new blog last week.

http://office365blog.wordpress.com

A lot of very good posts arounf office 365.

My Session @ Cloud Stammtisch

The last post announces the next Munich Cloud Session on April 14th.

There i am invited to explain our concept of developing Sharepoint in the cloud. Hope you like it.

 

Sharepoint Cloud Connector

Sounds interessting.

http://www.layer2.de/en/products/Pages/Cloud-Connector-for-SharePoint-2010-Office365.aspx

On a detailed view we can say that this is another system for the usecase of archiving data on cloud service. Yet i did not get the hosting service on which the product is bases. Is it a layer2 hostet Server?

There are some questions i could not answer right now. If someone has expierences with it, let me know.

 

Some impressing numbers on cloud computing

Money Quote:

“Since its launch, eBay has built up to eight server pools running a total of 2,000 servers. Its operating statistics are prodigious. It’s running 6,000 application servers, for example, for 94 million active users, and storing 9 petabytes of data.

Sample was able to illustrate on charts how much of his compute capacity sits idle or underutilized much of the time, the “white space,” he calls it on his charts. He figured he actually needs a maximum of 300-1,600 servers throughout the day.”

Source:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/infrastructure/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=L0KK023X2CBN5QE1GHRSKH4ATMY32JVN?articleID=229300681&pgno=2&queryText=&isPrev=

Good feeling working @Logica

Perhaps you heard about the carbon disclosure project. An interessting approach to save our childrens world. Yesterday my company announced that we have the competence to be a gold partner of this great project. Nonetheless because of our way of save energy.

Some words on how we are living this approach. It starts at taking trains for travel inside germany, using the cloud and ends in the automatic duplex option of our printer.

Small steps, i know, but better than nothing.

Future and Past

Pretty nice this project of an argentinian Photograph.

But check it out for yourself.

http://irinawerning.com/back-to-the-fut/back-to-the-future/

Here is my reward to it.