Jo Maitland, Google | OpenStack Silicon Valley 2014
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 16/09/2014

Jo Maitland, Google Cloud Platform, at OpenStackSV 2014 with John Furrier and Jeff Frick

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#Openstack #theCUBE #Google #Mirantis 
Back in 2007, Wikibon warned its members to read the fine print in cloud SLAs. At the time we were discussing Google’s terms with enterprise customers when we stated:

Google’s SLA terms do leave lots of wiggle room for the consumer giant such as:

▪    Promising penalties for downtime based on user error rates exceeding 5% but using server error rates as the adjudicating measure.

▪    Defining downtime as 10 minutes or more of contiguous interruption.

▪    Making credits contingent upon the customer’s timely notification of service interruption.

▪    Excluding planned downtime from service interruption.

▪    Offering three 9’s of availability for unplanned downtime (almost 9 hours/year).

In the past few days the seemingly infinite amount of coverage on—and scrutiny of—the cloud computing sector has risen to levels never quite seen before. With the continued downtime of Amazon’s EC2 service, bloggers, media outlets, pundits, analysts and users are all chiming in with their take on what this massive cloud outage means in the long-term for customers relying on—and planning to rely on—outsourced, pay-as-you-go services. As the Wikibon and SiliconAngle research teams were analyzing the data, from hundreds of links being tweeted and re-tweeted across mobile devices around the world, one key point became clear—there is a clear difference between the ruby-on-rails, developer-class, good-for-consumer cloud; and the enterprise-class cloud that is becoming more prevalent as a direct result of inadequate SLA commitments from large cloud players.

The Implication: Customers will have to match their data type to the cloud tier/cloud provider that aligns with their specific business objectives. It’s not about “to the cloud,” it’s about “what kind of data should be placed in the cloud and which type of cloud is most appropriate?”

One article that caught our attention came from Jo Maitland of SearchCloudComputing, who wrote that “the AWS customer list is long, but it’s mostly companies that can afford a little downtime without losing business.” Or can they?

Upon looking at the list of companies that are currently down due to AmazonEC2’s outage, “a little downtime” may sound right on the surface, but then we saw a tweet from Jason Calcanis (@jason) that really brought to light the grim reality of the impact that EC2 is having on companies with critical data in the Amazon cloud. Jason was quoting what is evidently an Amazon customer from the AWS forums:

“Life of our patients is at stake – I am desperately asking you to contact; we are a monitoring company and are monitoring hundreds of cardiac patients at home. We are unable to see their ECG signals since 21st of April. Can you please contact us?”

As we pointed out earlier this year, “Amazon has definitely taken once-expensive resources (e.g. compute and storage) and turned them into cheap commodities that come with a monthly bill. Amazon is creating a multi-billion dollar market for billable compute and storage by courting developers, startups and small enterprises—GREAT strategy; especially when you’re using your excess retail transaction capacity. BUT, for many enterprises, Amazon’s SLAs are not adequate. Amazon’s SLA’s are either too limited or too expensive. EMC’s Joe Tucci characterizes Amazon’s SLAs as “we’ll do our best but if we fail don’t call us.” And CIOs are telling their CEOs that Amazon is too risky, too insecure—i.e. good for the developer crowd but not for our world-class operation.

The key point is that CIOs and data center managers—no matter the size of company—need to be aware of the specific type of cloud they are placing their data in. Does the cloud provider have 24x7x365 support personnel or are you stuck dealing with a web page when a crisis erupts? If you’re monitoring the hearts of patients—you need to have a provider that guarantees five nines of availability at a minimum. This isn’t an option; it’s the fundamental cost of doing business.

Not to miss a marketing opportunity, Nirvanix is one company trying to leverage the less-than-stellar SLAs of companies like Amazon. Seizing on the Amazon outages, Nirvanix’s CEO, Scott Genereux, sent out a statement to the media last week:

“It’s always unfortunate when an outage or negative news happens in the cloud industry, but at times like these it’s important to understand what’s really going on. As the cloud became the buzz of the IT sector, both established and emerging vendors rushed products out to market. The result is offerings that are not purpose-built cloud architectures specifically designed for Enterprise IT organizations—organizations that cannot justify or tolerate any downtime.