Discussion topics:

Some data irrecoverable after Amazon Web Services crash

The company has not specified how many customers will be impacted, but those whose data can't be retrieved will be frustrated, to say the least. It may also prove further cause for AWS users to reassess their use of the service. Notably, that 0.07 percent of irrecoverable data represents just a portion of losses that Amazon's customers suffered from the outage. A venture-backed startup called Springpad, for example, saw the Web-based portion of its service go down for hours due to the AWS outage.

The Federal Government Embraces the Cloud

In the past 10 years, the US government went from owning 432 data centers to almost 2,100 data centers—a five-fold increase. As a result, 30 percent of federal IT spending last year went straight to data center infrastructure. (As the federal government has expanded, most companies are moving in the other direction, consolidating their data centers. For example, IBM recently consolidated from about 200 data centers to 12!) In addition to the massive amount of overhead this kind of infrastructure creates, it absolutely stifles any kind of agility or innovation because there’s so much fiscal, intellectual, and emotional capital invested in it.

Despite Amazon's fumble, cloud computing market projected to hit $241 billion by 2020

Amazon’s data center crash has created a small level of doubt in “the cloud” and the ability to serve tremendous amounts of data to sites like Reddit, Foursquare, and Hootsuite, but that was after Forrester completed their recent analysis of the future of the cloud market. In the study, they concluded that the market will jump nearly 6-fold in less than a decade from $40.7 billion in 2011 to $241 billion in 2020.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is projected to hit $21.2 billion in 2011 and expand to $92.8 billion in the next 5 years. Many social networks, quick-data ports, and SaaS providers rely or plan to rely on the cloud as the foundation for a stronger infrastructure to serve their customers.

Popular websites crippled by hours-long Amazon cloud service outage

Reddit, Foursquare, and other Web apps/services hit by outage, raising questions about Amazon's backup and disaster recovery plans

Amazon Outage....  on Wednesday, Amazon’s northern Virginia data center started experiencing problems that caused major latency and connectivity issues. The trouble was apparently due to excessive re-mirroring of its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes — this essentially created countless new backups of the EBS volumes that took up Amazon’s storage capacity and triggered a cascading effect that caused downtime on hundreds (or more likely thousands) of websites for almost 24 hours.

AWS has two concepts that relate to availability - Regions and Availability Zones.  They have five Regions - two in the US (one east coast, one west coast), one in Europe (Ireland), and two in Asia (Tokyo, Singapore).  Each region has within it multiple "Availability Zones" (AZs), which are supposed to be isolated so that they have no single point of failure less than a natural disaster or something of that magnitude.  AWS says that by "launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location".  It's not clear whether 'location' means separate datacenters or separate floors/areas of a single datacenter, but it doesn't really matter - the point is that AZs should fail independently until a catastrophic failure occurs.

IT's cloud resistance is starting to annoy businesses

Despite making strides, IT is still not widely embracing cloud computing, and businesspeople are becoming frustrated

Accenture and the LSE surveyed more than 1,035 business and IT executives and conducted more than 35 interviews with cloud providers, system integrators, and cloud service users. The key finding: There's a gap between business and IT. Businesspeople see the excitement and business benefits of cloud computing, so they're pushing for it. However, IT people see cloud computing as causing issues with security and lock-in, so they're pushing back.

Cloud Computing Helps Revive Corporate IT Spending, Boosts Intel and IBM

Better-than-expected earnings this week by several major technology vendors suggest a rebound is underway in corporate IT spending - much of which was postponed by the recession - and a big surge in cloud computing investments.

Intel Corporation (Nasdaq: INTC) reported a 34% rise in first-quarter profit due to strong sales of chips for high-end servers used in data centers in addition to a surprising increase in PC chip sales. And International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) reported its highest revenue growth in a decade as businesses bought more servers and equipment for data centers.

Popular cloud sync app raises security fears

Dropbox makes it easy to sync files among devices, but a crucial weakness points to yet another soft spot in cloud security

There they go again: Microsoft, Google's latest cloud tussle                   

Microsoft suggests Google lies on Google Apps FISMA compliance; Google says older version's certification applies

Cloud Computing Standards: Too Many, Doing Too Little

The IEEE created a ripple in the cloud computing community this week by weighing in with its own proposals for cloud computing standards. But there's already the OVF standard and a few others -- creating duplication and not enough progress, analysts say.

IEEE aims to drive cloud computing standards

VMware takes over Mozy backup service

Why Cisco's CEO is sounding the alarm

Dave, Bill, and Brenda talk about the 3 top Cloud Computing stories from March.