Dave: AWS Outage
For the second time this month, Amazon.com's Northern Virginia data center suffered an outage caused by a line of powerful thunderstorms coming through the area late Friday night. Disrupted services included Elastic Compute, Elastic Cache, Elastic MapReduce, and Relational Database Services. The outage has affected Instagram, Pinterest, Netflix, and Heroku, used by many startups and mobile apps. (The previous Amazon Web Services outage in Amazon.com's northern Virginia facilities occurred on June 14.)
Chris: VMware Acquires DynamicOps in Cloud Play
This is an interesting story because it allows us to highlight a few misunderstood concepts related to IaaS.
The quote is: “"As IT organizations evolve from builders to brokers of services, many seek to provide access to diverse cloud resources in a controlled, managed fashion," said Ramin Sayar, vice president and general manager, Virtualization and Cloud Management, VMware. "DynamicOps' multi-cloud and multi-platform capabilities help to strengthen VMware's position as the infrastructure and management vendor of choice for cloud computing."
Now, while I like VMware for virtualization I have not been easy on VMware regarding cloud in the past. Noone has - virtualization does not equate to cloud. It does help by encapsulating the servers and offers tremendous savings in power, cooling, and compute if you go uniform but it doesn’t get you anywhere closer to being able to scale business capability out on demand. You still have to scale up as the applicaiton servers are not all analogous to web servers - in the healthcare industry this is like having to install an EHR for every 2 or 3 hospitals as most peak out around 500 beds. Scaling out business capability is accomplished at the PaaS, SaaS, and BPaaS layers. Configurations, or as Chef calls them “recipes”, for infrastructure are just the first thing you figure out. Configurations for middleware, applications, and business processes are more important to business outcomes, and that’s what CMP and BPM get you.
All that said, this acquisition is a step in the right direction as it is yet another force bringing cloud interoperability together.
I’ve heard a lot recently that the hypervisor is a non-factor, they all work and work relatively well now. The differentiator in the virtual data center now is all about virtual infrastructure management (VIM), and that comes down to your management and monitoring platforms. For vCloud shops what this means is that they can now manage Oracle and Citrix.
This gets even more interesting when you look at the cloud management platform (CMP), which is not the same thing as a virtual infrastructure management capability. Using tools like Chef and Puppet in conjunction with VIM tools really lets you master your orchestration of servers and choreography of services. The “Big Four” in that space are IBM, HP, BMC, and CA - I don’t think they have the best tools in the CMP space I think that whenever there’s a gap recognized they buy a company though and that has gotten them market dominance in the short to mid term.
In summary - good move by VMware to position themselves as the VIM of choice but I still don’t see any true CMP capabilities and that shouldn’t be ignored.
Jeff: MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win
MapR's latest deal is tied to Google's big June 28 announcement of the Google Compute Engine, new infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) that sets up the search giant as a public-cloud rival to Amazon Web Services (AWS). MapR is one of at least six partners debuting services on the Google infrastructure, which is currently in limited beta release. MapR and Google are currently signing up customers to join a private preview of the Hadoop services that will run on Google Compute Engine.
News of the Google partnership came just two weeks after MapR and Amazon announced that services based on its M3 and M5 Hadoop software distributions would be available on AWS.
MapR distinguishes itself from Hadoop software distribution and support competitors Cloudera and Hortonworks by providing high-performance options not supported on standard Apache open source Hadoop software. MapR's M5 distribution, for example, replaces the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) with a derivative of the Unix-based Network File System. M5 includes snapshotting, mirroring, and other high-availability features that aren't currently supported on the current (1.0) Hadoop code line
Pricing and service details have not been finalized for MapR's services on the Google Compute Engine. Basic compute pricing on the Compute Engine starts at $0.145 per hour for a single core with 3.75 gigabytes of memory.
