How to survive a cloud outage

You can't prevent your cloud service provider from going down, but there are ways to protect yourself

Amazon's infamous cloud outage in April brought down a number of popular Web sites, including foursquare and Reddit - but many of Amazon's enterprise cloud customers were able to weather the storm without experiencing downtime.

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Guide to cloud management software
They architected their systems for resiliency by using multiple availability zones, having hot backups in traditional data centers, or having a backup cloud provider set up and ready to go in case of a problem.

Silicon Valley-based photosharing company SmugMug stayed up through the outage even as its peers failed. That was partly because it avoided the use of Amazon's Elastic Block Storage - the particular service component that went down.

But the company also spread its systems across several Amazon data centers - what Amazon calls "availability zones."

Other companies would have stayed up as well if they had also distributed their applications, says SmugMug CEO Chris MacAskill. He also recommends that companies also use multiple Amazon regions, which are more isolated from one another than availability zones. Of course, Amazon does charge extra for using multiple zones, so that needs to be taken into account.

SmugMug relies heavily on Amazon, using its cloud-based Simple Storage Service (S3) to store customer photos and videos. SmugMug also uses many instances of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). But instead of using Elastic Block Storage - which is attached to individual EC2 instances, and often used to store operational data - the company still uses traditional data centers.

That has its own downsides - the week of Amazon's outage, for example, the company lost a core router, its backup, and a core master database server. "I wish I didn't have to deal with routers or database hardware failures anymore, which is why we're still marching towards the cloud," MacAskill says.

And, despite the outage, the cloud-based services that he gets from Amazon are still better than what SmugMug could have on its own, he adds, and better than other cloud service providers. "We're very committed to them," he says.

Israel-based startup Kitely Ltd. only used one of Amazon's availability zones - but, fortunately, not the one that went down.

However, the company plans to learn from the experience. "We intend to split all of our services across multiple availability zones," Kitely CTO Oren Hurvitz says.

Kitely, which runs cloud-based virtual meeting and collaboration environments based on the OpenSim platform, also performs continuous checks to ensure that all of its services are up and running.

"Our system is designed with the assumption that any service might stop working at any time," he says. "If we discover that a server is not responding then we terminate it and start a new server instead."
Traditional backups

Another company unaffected by the outage because it used multiple availability zones was Mashery, which provides APIs to more than 100 companies such as BestBuy, Hoovers and The New York Times. But Mashery also has another backup plan - a traditional data center.

"We very early on realized that there could be a service problem where Amazon would be entirely unavailable, and we decided that we needed fail-over infrastructure," Mashery CEO Oren Michels says. "We have dedicated hardware with Internap."

Atlanta-based Internap Network Services Corp. provides not only a hot backup site for Mashery but also a production environment for customers that need lower latency than possible with a cloud, or services delivered in geographic areas where Amazon is not available.

"We maintain plenty of infrastructure on both sides to handle peak load," he says.

When Mashery was first building its cloud infrastructure two years ago, Amazon was the only real player in town. Backing up to another cloud was not an option back then - but it might be possible now.

"We're definitely keeping our eye on it," he says. "But if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Amazon has worked amazingly well for us. Likewise, Internap has been a great partner and continues to provide us the services we need."

Internap has even lowered its prices to stay competitive, he adds, though price isn't the major factor in his decision-making.

"We have a hundred huge brands as customers," he says. "It's more expensive to lose customers in case their stuff goes down. Our customers pay us to solve their API problems, and that includes that we stay up if there's an outage."

Companies that are just making the transition to the cloud often use traditional data centers as backups at the start of the process, says Rob Enderle, an analyst at research firm Enderle Group.

"You can have a set of lesser resources that are on stand-by that you can failover to," he says. "Often, that's whatever you had before you moved to the cloud. You can fail-over to a lower-performing technology and still hold your customers."

Companies that have some applications running in a traditional data center and some running in the cloud may be able to double up, he says, and use the same disaster recovery site for both, since the odds are low that Amazon would go down at the same exact time as the traditional data center.

But he warned against trusting too much in using one set of cloud services as a backup for another set of cloud services on the same cloud.

"A redundant service might use some of the same resources as the primary service," he says. "Care should be taken to ensure that redundancies are, in fact, redundant and not simply a different name for overlapping hardware and software."
Secondary cloud providers

Using a cloud service provider as a backup for a traditional data center is typically more cost-effective than the other way around.

That's because with a cloud service provider, you pay for computing cycles. When it's not being used, customers need only have the minimum computing power running to enable a quick switch-over, and then add more server capacity as needed.

With a traditional data center, enough servers have to be available to handle peak workload, even if they are rarely used. That translates to hardware costs as well as power and staffing requirements - typically a traditional backup center would double total computing costs, while a cloud backup would only add a fraction.

Offering The A-To-Z Of Enterprise Solutions On One Platform

Here’s a Web application that claims to offer multiple enterprise management tools on a single platform. We take a close look at the product and explore the technology that drives it!

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As the market talks about ‘recession proofing’, here is a tool that offers an integrated, customised and hassle-free IT environment to enterprises, and that too on a subscription basis. A2zapps.com—a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform—lets businesses automate their operations across the board or for select departments. It offers business software (CRM, ERP and other IT enterprise solutions) on a subscription basis. The service is offered in much the same way telecom vendors provide telephony services to their subscribers – users just need to pay a monthly subscription fee. The service is entirely available on the Web and does not require any server installation or front-end programming at the customer’s end.

It’s different, and how!

Pointing out the difference between A2zapps.com and other SaaS offerings, Kantanu Kundu, CEO and chairman, A2zapps.com, says, “Most of the SaaS products available in India either focus on a specific application or vertical; or are hosted models (single-tenancy), with limited customisation. The rest are headquartered outside Asia and require major technical skills to customise as per customer needs. But to get started with A2zapps.com, at the most, one needs to know Java Script and HTML (no Java/C++ programming is required), even if the customer needs heavy customisation.”

Kundu says that the majority of the IT enterprise solution providers have tweaked their existing on-premises models to fit into the hosted/SaaS model. In some cases, they lack true multi-tenancy. While in others, the software has been built to work on a LAN (local area network) and, therefore, is too bulky to be able to provide fast access on a WAN (wide area network) link. But A2zapps.com has been built on the SaaS (multi-tenant) platform (any apps) architecture from Day One. The extensibility of the platform provides customers the flexibility to add new applications as they grow. So users can start with minimum functionality, improve usage and then start adding other modules without any extra cost. In fact, the pricing for subscriptions and for customisation has been done keeping the Indian SME (small and medium enterprise) segment in mind and is not a global dollar pricing like that of most MNC software providers in India.

High on usability

A2zapps.com provides a comprehensive set of applications that are interlinked and can help organisations to use it for their group companies, as well as every single department within each group company like HR, sales, support and operations. The highlight of A2zapps.com is its simple screens and tabs, and its ease of use, says Kundu. “The product is ideally suited for the Indian emerging enterprise space that often lacks IT skills…and needs systems that are easy to use, and are completely hassle-free,” he adds.

The application offers the ability to import and export data, and reports in the most commonly used formats like spreadsheets. In addition to all these, labels for menus, fields, and reports can be named according to the organisation’s naming conventions, thereby making it user-friendly. The product currently supports various verticals like education, healthcare, professional services, logistics services, real estate and construction, hotels, manufacturing, and non-profit organisations. One of the early users of the application, Capt R K Mittal, MD, MAHAN Institute, says: “The platform has allowed us to integrate many activities at our centres in the Delhi/NCR region, thereby providing the best collaborative environment at an affordable cost.”.

Let's face it: HTML5 is no app dev panacea

Don't believe the hype: building serious applications still takes more than mere Web markup

Nothing frustrates a professional developer more than hearing someone describe themselves as "an HTML programmer." Coding Web pages with markup has about as much to do with real programming as writing a menu has to do with cooking a meal. But you wouldn't think so to hear platform vendors tell it. Lately, HTML has been made out to be a preferred development tool for everything from smartphone and tablet apps to full-blown desktop applications.

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Palm launched its WebOS platform claiming developers needed nothing more than Web standards to build apps for it. Microsoft did the same with Windows Phone 7. Google's Chrome browser has a "Web store" that lets you shop for desktop Web applications. But my jaw finally dropped when a recent demo showed how developers will be able to use HTML5 to write apps for Windows 8, leading panicked Windows developers to speculate that Microsoft was planning to drop support for Silverlight and even .Net itself.

[ Get your websites up to speed with HTML5 today using the techniques in InfoWorld's HTML5 Deep Dive PDF how-to report. | Also on InfoWorld: "HTML5 in the browser: Canvas, video, audio, and graphics" | "HTML5 in the browser: Local data storage | "HTML5 in the browser: HTML5 data communications." ]
HTML5 Deep Dive

Holy cow. Are we really so blinded by the HTML5 hype wagon that we'd believe Microsoft is ready to scupper core Windows APIs in favor of Web standards? It makes no sense. HTML5 is a fine tool and it will do great things for the Web, but lately it's been pushed to such lofty heights that it's plain ridiculous. As welcome as HTML5 is, there are plenty of reasons why nobody should consider it the universal development tool of choice. Here are some caveats to consider.

1. Good luck building anything with HTML alone
Anyone who suggests you can build apps in HTML is pulling your leg. What they really mean is you can build apps using HTML and JavaScript, but even this doesn't give you the whole picture. The minimum for any real Web application is HTML, JavaScript, and CSS -- three separate languages, all at once. The W3C's HTML5 effort has added still more APIs to the mix of Web standards, enabling such capabilities as multithreading and local storage. This is assuming your app won't communicate with any kind of server-side component -- for heavy computation or storage, perhaps -- and all the additional languages, APIs, and standards you'd need to confront then.

When anyone suggests that building apps is "as easy as building Web apps," what are they really saying? Web development has evolved into a complex, multitiered, multilanguage discipline. Often it's no picnic. Is that really the model we want to foist off on the next generation of developers?