Blog entries

Going beyond compliance: achieving true security in the Cloud

Eric Novikoff — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 18:44:41 +0100

One of the largest barriers to cloud deployments is the actual or perceived lack of security in the shared infrustructure used to provide cloud services. Companies seeking to create applications that meet PCI, HIPAA, or FIPS standards are struggling with the twin challenges of actually meeting the requirements as well as finding auditors that are well enough versed in cloud technology to assess whether those requirements are met by a proposed cloud deployment. On the other side ...

The Straight Dope About Cloud Downtime and the Myth of Perfection

Eric Novikoff — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 21:52:46 +0100

In the last 10 days, ENKI experienced two downtimes that seriously impacted some of our customers. What was common to the two failures is that they were due to unavoidable single points of failure in ENKI's infrastructure, points of failure that we had no control over. ENKI, like all top-tier cloud providers (and colo/datacenter providers) has taken painstaking care to remove all possible single points of failure in its infrastructure, from the power coming into the dat...

The two basic types of cloud architecture

Eric Novikoff — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:18:17 +0100

While the debate about what Cloud computing really is rages on with respect to IaaS (infrastructure as a service) or PaaS (platform as a service), the actual architectures behind these types of cloud have coalesced into two basic types: dedicated server slices, and fully abstracted computing resources.

The earliest and largest cloud services including Amazon and Rackspace are all based on dedicated server slices. The basic idea is to provide a server with RAM/CPU, disk, and net...

Why overallocation makes cloud computing services impossible to compare

Eric Novikoff — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:53:25 +0100

Various recent user surveys and performance measurements done on cloud computing systems show great variability over time as well as between services, which affects both the perceived reliability of the system and the effective price paid for cloud computing. The root cause of this performance variation is overallocation of resources. This blog entry will explore what overallocation is and how to minimize its effects.

First of all, let's remember that cloud computing's bi...

Does Cloud Computing Drive Vendor Lock-in?

Eric Novikoff — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:22:19 +0100

Dell is asserting that cloud computing is raising the danger of vendor lock-in, which the IT industry has been successfully trying to reduce, by "shoehorning" proprietary technology into private clouds.

Well, nothing has really changed: buyer beware still rules the day!

The whole point of virtualization - the core enabler of cloud computing - is to separate hardware architecture from implementation. Yet there are many cloud solutions that are proprietary. And it's ...

Is Amazon "all that?"

Eric Novikoff — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 23:51:51 +0100

James Urquhart asks, "Can any cloud catch Amazon Web Services?"

His answer: It's nearly impossible though it may happen eventually.

I couldn't disagree more with this analysis. Certainly, within a limited scope, Amazon shall remain dominant because of the reasons you listed. However, if Amazon were "all that", they would have captured a significant portion of the overall IT market by now, not just early adopters and developers. There are plenty of ways other companies c...

Report From VMWorld: is the cloud industry getting ahead of itself?

Eric Novikoff — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 02:26:19 +0100

This week's VMWorld conference was a bit of a surprise to me. Held in Las Vegas, the expo was considerably smaller than previous years in San Francisco perhaps due to lower marketing budgets (or higher costs of attendance) since vendor's booths were smaller and less ambitious than in previous years. But what was more interesting was the limited commercial focus of the event: provisioning. This year's exhibitor focus was on getting VMs into the cloud with a ...

Is Cloud Hype Beneficial?

Eric Novikoff — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:43:54 +0100

In his recent blog post, "Don't dismiss cloud computing hype; creative fog is what makes cloud work", Kevin Fogarty of ITWorld asserts that cloud hype is actually beneficial since it stimulates innovation and adoption by driving providers to stretch capabilities and customers to try new things (a short paraphrase.) While this would be completely true in an academic environment in which some new theory or knowledge domain was being debated and developed, there ar...

HostingCon Report

Eric Novikoff — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 05:29:11 +0100

I just spent 3 days at the HostingCon conference in San Diego. For a cloud service provider, it was pretty eye-opening to for the first time, see the entire ecosystem for hosters as opposed to the pure enterprise-cloud world that we normally work with. What is amazing is that the bulk of the revenue from Hosting/Bulk Hosting/Shared Hosting still comes from individual servers running unvirtualized CPanel/Plesk or other control panels. Many of the booths at t...

Are clouds designed to fail?

Eric Novikoff — Tue, 24 May 2011 15:14:57 +0100

Today I received an email from the Cloud Connect conference soliciting sponsorship. It began with the eye-opening comment, "Clouds are designed to fail - they're made of transient, unreliable components." It then goes on to say that at the conference, an analyst will lead a discussion about architecting applications to work around expected failure.

But I'd like to go back and examine the opening comment. Are clouds really designed to fail? If you are a clo...

Want to get a big bang out of the Cloud? Don't think linearly!

Eric Novikoff — Tue, 24 May 2011 14:25:54 +0100

One of the huge advantages of the cloud is its ability to cut the time to market for new ideas, creating more agile enterprises. While rapid provisioning and access to a larger set of resources than you might otherwise have contributes to this, the biggest win comes from realizing that the cloud eliminates the need to think linearly.

Over the last 10 years or so, software development methodologies have evolved from a "waterfall" analogy where design was followed by develop...

Why Did HP Warn That Cloud Computing Early Adopters Are At Risk?

Eric Novikoff — Fri, 20 May 2011 11:13:48 +0100

Today, HP warned that cloud computing early adopters faced security risks.

But the timing and motivation for such a warning are suspect: the risk that HP is warning about is already present for for organizations that don't have an adequate security plan. Where their infrastructure is - virtual, physical, cloud - is of little consequence if there is no application-dependent security plan in place. Once the application-dependent plan is created, it must be adapted to the ...

The Cloud Ecosystem's Conspiracy of Silence

Eric Novikoff — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 13:11:11 +0100

After last week's meltdown at Amazon, a lot of people (including me) are talking about what needs to change in cloud computing to provide users with a greater degree of confidence in cloud and the vendors that provide it. So far, I have focused on the customers of cloud as having a great deal of influence over the levels of service they experience, since ultimately they have the power whether it is in how they use the service or which provider they choose. The more informed ...

How Amazon's Cloud Failure Shows The Way For Future Use Of The Cloud

Eric Novikoff — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 14:33:38 +0100

In my last blog article, I wrote about what had happened to cause so many customers at Amazon's EC2 service to go down last week. Now, I'd like to share my observations and learnings about this event gleaned from running our own cloud computing service and practice.

I have written extensively in the past about how cloud services have not progressed to the point where companies can do without IT operations, despite the apparent ease of starting an instance in the cloud. ...

Did the Failure at Amazon Reveal a Problem with Cloud Computing?

Eric Novikoff — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:05:08 +0100

It's been a few days now since Amazon's Virginia datacenter failed and took down hundreds of internet companies, including serveral high-visibility startup companies and platform-as-a-service providers. There has been a lot of talk about how this failure, which "was never supposed to happen" is a blow to cloud computing. However, I think it's more of a blow to the freewheeling marketing practices for cloud computing, and to those consumers of cloud who thought that it eliminated t...

PC World Learns SLAs Matter When Buying Cloud

Eric Novikoff — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:51:13 +0100

PC World wrote about what your business can learn from the Amacon Cloud Outage, noting that you should examine the SLAs you get from your cloud provider as an indicator of the level of reliability of their cloud product, as well as looking at diversification and simply deciding what is mission critical in your company.

"And while you're negotiating those deals with one or more cloud providers, take a minute to examine your service level...

How is ENKI Different?

Eric Novikoff — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 15:24:29 +0100

We keep getting asked by prospective clients for an elevator pitch about how ENKI is different than its competitors. In a meeting with a Fortune 500 company yesterday, I blurted this out. Our sales advisor was there and wrote it down, so I'm posting it here!

1. Service Level Agreements: Many cloud companies' service can vary in performance by up to 10x over a 24 hour period. ENKI has deployed high performance...

RSA Conference study to reveal cloud frustration

Eric Novikoff — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 15:00:46 +0100

"Overall, 73 percent of respondents said they need new skills to deal with cloud" claims a study interviewing 10,000 security professionals by Frost & Sullivan to be presented at the upcoming RSA conference.

I think a big part of the confusion is the hiding of infrastructure design that cloud vendors engage in. Part of the hiding is clearly to retain intellectual property ownership, but when you take into account discoveries like the recent one at Ston...

Fundamentals of Writing Software for the Cloud

Eric Novikoff — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 23:06:35 +0100

One of the biggest tragedies - and one that ENKI is often called upon to work around or repair after the fact - is that our customers don't write their applications for cloud deployment before they come to us wanting to deploy them. Often, other considerations dominate, such as rapid time-to-market, inadequate staffing to rewrite a demo application for production, or simply not knowing what is required. The result is that our successful customers have often had m...

Securing your cloud application - https is required!

Eric Novikoff — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 14:26:45 +0100

This may come as a surprise to you, but if your website uses cookies to validate its users, then anyone accessing it over public wifi can easily have their identity hijacked. A Firefox plugin called FireSheep allows anyone in range of your users to see that they're logged in and take over their identity. This actually applies to applications like Facebook and Twitter, in case you think this is a obscure corner case. The next time you try to use one of them in a c...