January 11th, 2010

reddit on Amazon EC2: Users and page views grow, cost shrinks

Positive cloud adoption metrics from reddit:

“As most of you know, we moved reddit to EC2 back in May of 2009. Our experience there has been excellent so far. Since we moved to EC2, the number of unique users has gone up 50%, and pageviews are up more than 100%. To support this growth, we have added 30% more ram and 50% more CPU, yet because of Amazon’s constant price reductions, we are actually paying less per month now than when we started.”

The reddit blog post was in response to opinions that reddit’s site had slowed since the move to Amazon.  The post continues with a “nerd alert” section on the volume-based cause of the slowdown, and described the necessary changes to reddit’s database and caching architecture.

I won’t replicate the description here, but suffice it to say, scale doesn’t guarantee performance.

Tagged as: Amazon, EC2, metrics, reddit

Posted by brenda michelson at 4:09 pm in adoption, Cloud Watch, elasticity & scale, performance & reliability, use cases | Permalink | Comments(1)
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January 6th, 2010

5 Enduring Aspects of Cloud Computing

Forgoing the hyperbole of cloud computing predictions – sensational outages to a cloud-in-every-pocket – I want to start 2010 discussing the enduring aspects of cloud computing on enterprise business-technology.  Regardless of the final manifestation of cloud computing, and the tally of deployments, successes and failures, I believe cloud computing will influence the expectations and practice of enterprise business-technology throughout the decade.

I have identified five enduring aspects from a practitioner perspective.  Certainly, there are enduring aspects on the provider side as well, such as advances from Infrastructure 2.0 and disruptions created by new economic and pricing models.  However, I will leave that list for provider-side specialists. 

The first three enduring aspects focus on the expectations from business-technology organizations. 

1. Resource Optimization – Cloud computing has raised Executive awareness to the disproportion of installed versus utilized computing capacity, along with the requisite expenses of space, power, software licenses and support personnel. 

If they have not already, Executives will mandate infrastructure ecology initiatives, starting with the consolidation and pooling of compute and data resources, and progressing to software execution efficiency. 

 more >>

Tagged as: 2010 hypothesis, brenda michelson, capability delivery, popular post

Posted by brenda michelson at 5:59 pm in Blog, economics, elasticity & scale, fundamentals, infrastructure 2.0, performance & reliability, platform, pundit positions, software architecture | Permalink | Comments(4)
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July 21st, 2009

Cloud Watching: Scale does not guarantee Performance

A great feature of cloud computing is elasticity.  If your application needs more horsepower, a compute cloud can dynamically assign more resources.  When the usage spike ends, the resources can be removed.  However, the ability to scale doesn’t guarantee your application will perform satisfactorily for the additional load.  This could be due to a variety of issues, some might be cloud related, such as the additional overhead of running in a virtual machine, but more likely, the application wasn’t built (architected, designed) for scale.  A database bound application won’t be magically fixed by adding more computing power. 

Tagged as: archives, CloudTest, performance testing, SOASTA

Posted by brenda michelson at 11:56 am in Blog, elasticity & scale, performance & reliability | Permalink | Comments(0)
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May 19th, 2009

@ Interop’s Enterprise Cloud Summit: What Elasticity really means

What Elasticity Really Means

Moderator:

Ian Rae, CEO, Syntenic

Speakers:

  • Jon Beck, SVP Sales and Client Services, OpSource, Inc.
  • Scott Clark, Director of Engineering Infrastructure, Broadcom
  • Josh Litwin, President and CEO, Memento Press
  • Geir Magnusson, Consulting Architect, Platform, Gilt
  • Chad Swartz, Senior Manager, IT Operations, Preferred Hotel Group

Finally, some cloud computing practitioners, small business, enterprise, web retail and technology – Memento Press, Preferred Hotel Group, Gilt and Broadcom. 

 more >>

Tagged as: archives, Broadcom, Chad Swartz, Geir Magnusson, Gilt, Ian Rae, Interop, Jon Beck, Josh Litwin, live coverage, Memento Press, OpSource, Preffered Hotel Group, Scott Clark, Syntenic

Posted by brenda michelson at 2:17 pm in Blog, elasticity & scale, use cases | Permalink | Comments(0)
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May 19th, 2009

@ Interop’s Enterprise Cloud Summit: On demand economics panel

This morning’s focus in on the business case for cloud computing, ROI & migration.  "What’s the promise? Despite the downsides, there’s little doubt that on-demand computing services are the future of both consumer and enterprise IT.”

First up in a panel discussion: The Case for Cloud Infrastructure: On-Demand Economics

Moderator:

John Willis, Owner, Zabovo

Panelists: