Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft opened its Windows Azure Infrastructure cloud services to everyone today — a sign that the company is both serious about its cloud division and ready to take business away from its big-name competitors. How? To start, Microsoft lowered prices.

Microsoft tested Azure over the last year and believes the product is out of its incubating stage and ready for general availability. With Azure’s infrastructure services, you can add features of the cloud to your existing architecture. Companies like Amazon and Rackspace, however, have already been in the game for some time with their own versions of cloud hosting. And Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) has become very popular.

In addition to using your existing cloud infrastructure, Microsoft also says that you can run apps to help you manage your cloud, including SQL Server, SharePiont, BizTalk Server, and Dynamic Nav.

It’s clear that Microsoft is going after other cloud providers. Microsoft specifically names Amazon in its announcement about Azure, saying that it will reduce its prices 21 percent to 33 percent in order to stay competitive. These price drops will affect the computer, storage, and bandwidth components of the Azure product. It will also get a memory boost to, as Microsoft has found test customers to have more demanding workloads than originally expected.

Microsoft Windows Azure general manager Bill Hilf explained in a blog post that Microsoft recognizes “customers have a choice.”

Thus far, Windows Azure has attracted 200,000 customers.

hat tip New York Times; Windows Azure image via ToddABishop/Flickr

Cloud care is free.

Half of cloud deployments are insecure and vulnerable to attack, and a third are not properly set up to maintain service if Amazon Web Services has downtime, says cloud optimization company Newvem. Which is why Newvem is releasing a free version of its analytics product to pinpoint problems in small and medium-sized business’s clouds.

A sample Newvem report

“We’re just amazed at how exposed many small and medium-sized customers of Amazon are,” Newvem CEO Zev Laderman told me yesterday from Tel Aviv.

The free services that Newvem will now offer include emergency triage, activity diagnostics, and cost efficiency reports. The reports will highlight security risks, show where companies can improve availability options in case of Amazon cloud issues, point out where backups are needed, and expose situations in which companies can resize their cloud usage and potentially move to a lower service level to save money.

Newvem tracks almost $250 million in Amazon EC2 usage annually and has 1,500 cloud clients who use its services to manage their increasingly sophisticated — and complex — cloud deployments. Enterprise clients and heavy cloud users get more trend analysis, can separate cloud usage by business group, get better Amazon reserved instance tracking and S3 analysis, which shows what storage capacity they have and what they’re actually using.

“The big guys who spend over $1,00,000 … they have everything they want,” Laderman says. “But the small and medium guys, there’s a big gap.”

This new product, Cloud Care, is aimed solidly at those small and medium guys, who might spend $1,000 to $5,000 a month on Amazon. Based on Amazon Web Services’ projected 2013 revenue of around $3 billion, that group likely consists of about 3,500 businesses that are using, but not necessarily optimizing, the cloud.

Amazon delivers its cloud services with what it calls a “shared responsibility” model. The problem is that the small and medium users don’t have the same level of resources as the big boys to devote full-time staff to ensuring they keep up with their side.

A sample report from Newvem

photo credit: bitzcelt via photopin cc

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Looks like last night’s Netflix outages didn’t happen just because too many of us were escaping our families in the warm, familiar glow of bad TV shows. It’s Amazon’s fault. Specifically, Amazon Web Services, and more specifically yet, EC2.

UPDATE, 12:15 p.m. Pacific: Services have been restored. You may go back to avoiding your family and watching bad TV shows.

EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud; it’s Amazon’s service for pay-as-you-go, (ostensibly) scalable cloud computing. A huge swath of big, cool apps use EC2, so saying “EC2 is down!” is like saying, “Depending on geographies, half the Internet you actually care about is down!”

The last time we saw EC2 take a big ol’ swandive was back in October. Yes, just two months ago, Amazon managed to flatline a bunch of services, like Flipboard, Airbnb, and Reddit.

If you take a look at the AWS health dashboard, you’ll see this morning that some services (elastic load balancing, Elastic Beanstalk) are still experiencing issues in North America.

For its part, Heroku (which platform-as-a-service also supports a huge swath of the Internet you care about) is also having issues, including HTTP errors and ssl:endpoint unavailability. In other words, if you’re using Heroku for https://, your site might be down. Or it might not serve pages and pictures correctly. Or it might be fine. Just depends.

There’s a lesson in here. For normal people who don’t work at Netflix or AWS or Heroku or Pinterest and who also celebrate Christmas, the lesson is get off your iPhone and go hang out with your family. They won’t be around forever.

The lesson for devs not employed at Heroku or AWS: Don’t put all your eggs in the exact same basket as everyone else on the Internet.

The lesson for AWS and Heroku employees is, much like ER doctors or plumbers, don’t count on a holiday.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

(Updated 7/9/2012 with comment from Netflix engineer Ariel Tseitlin.)

Netflix has published an explanation of the Amazon EC2 outage that took down the video-streaming service for hours on June 29 and 30.

In addition to Netflix, the Amazon outage took down Instagram, Pinterest, and other sites that rely on Amazon’s cloud-based computing service. On July 4, Amazon published its own explanation of the snafu, which started with a power failure, led to a failure of the backup generators, and then caused a series of cascading failures with its load-balancing hardware.

Netflix’s analysis discovered that it, too, had problems with its own load-balancing service. “This caused unhealthy instances to fail to deregister from the load-balancer which black-holed a large amount of traffic into the unavailable zone,” Netflix engineers Greg Orzell and Ariel Tseitlin wrote in the post.

Despite the “storm” of failures, Netflix remains confident about its decision to move to cloud-based services in late 2010. The company’s resiliency to cloud failures has actually gotten better, the post argues.

“While it’s easy and common to blame the cloud for outages because it’s outside of our control, we found that our overall availability over the past several years has steadily improved,” Orzell and Tseitlin wrote.

However, the company is looking for help. If you’re an experienced cloud operations engineer, Netflix wants to see your résumé, as it is continuing to hire people for its Cloud Operations and Reliability Engineering team.

“We’re still actively beefing up our reliability engineering team…always looking for good people,” Tseitlin tweeted to VentureBeat.

Story via TNW.

Photo credit: Arthur40A via photo pin

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

An outage of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud in North Virginia has taken down Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram, and other services. According to numerous Twitter updates and our own checks, all three services are unavailable as of Friday evening at 9:10 p.m. PT.

Amazon’s service health dashboard indicates that there are power issues in its North Virginia data center, most likely caused by severe storms in the region.

Independent checks by VentureBeat of Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, and Heroku show each site not operating. Netflix has acknowledged the issue on its customer support Twitter account:

Instagram’s support Twitter account has also noted ongoing issues:

Heroku’s status and incident dashboard says: “Our engineers continue to work to restore affected systems. Some production applications are unaffected but many applications are offline. API access is disabled while we restore service.”

As of 8:49 p.m. PT, Amazon claims that “power has been restored to the impacted Availability Zone and we are working to bring impacted instances and volumes back online.” If power has been restored to its North Virginia data center, we would expect that the affected services will be back online shortly. But until then, agitated users will just have to sit back and relax.

Update: As of 9:20 p.m. PT, Amazon said it is still working to fix the issue: “We are continuing to work to bring the instances and volumes back online. In addition, EC2 and EBS APIs are currently experiencing elevated error rates.”

Update 2: As of 9:54 p.m. PT, Amazon said: “EC2 and EBS APIs are once again operating normally. We are continuing to recover impacted instances and volumes.”

Update 3: Independent checks of Netflix and Pinterest show the two sites back and working normally in most regards. Most likely, service is being restored to all services as we update.

Update 4: At 4:42 a.m. PT, Amazon said: “We are continuing to work to recover the remaining EC2 instances, EBS volumes, and ELBs.” At this time, Instagram is still down, while Heroku said it is still recovering some features as of 7:10 a.m. PT.

Update 5: As of Saturday afternoon, all affected services including Instagram appear to be functioning normally again.

With the critical Amazon outage, which is the second this month, we wouldn’t be surprised if these popular services started looking at other options, including Rackspace, SoftLayer, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google’s just-introduced Compute Engine. Some of Amazon’s biggest EC2 outages occurred in April and August of last year.

Let us know in the comments if you are seeing any other services that are down in this massive outage.

Storm clouds photo: divingrocks/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s iCloud runs on two services from its biggest competitors, Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s elastic cloud, reports The Register.

Sources tell the site that both Microsoft and Amazon were instructed to remain mum on the iCloud deal. Amazon’s elastic cloud is already established as a go-to service for any company that wants to offload data and other resources, but the deal serves as a major validation for Microsoft’s Windows Azure.

Writes The Register: “iCloud puts Azure into a different league, given the brand love for Apple and the Apple management’s fanatical attitude to perfection. It is a “huge consumer brand, a great opportunity to get Azure under a very visible workload,” our sources told us.”

Apple is likely aiming to avoid potential iCloud outages by selecting two cloud suppliers. The company has already had the headache of dealing with outages for its MobileMe service, which relied on a single external provider. Apple is also building its own massive data center in North Carolina, which could eventually take over some of the load for iCloud.

The Register notes that iCloud is thought to be running on Microsoft’s full Azure service, which includes the Azure compute and controller features, as well as its SQL storage. Data on iCloud is being striped across both Amazon and Microsoft’s services, a process which allows iCloud to speed up data access since it doesn’t have to rely on a single disk or service. To accomplish this, Apple, perhaps together with Microsoft and Amazon, has come up with some sort of solution for easily identifying and accessing data across both services.

But unlike the company’s disastrous cloud crash in April, which lasted around 10 days, this time Amazon’s Web Services was back up and running without issue in about an hour. Amazon’s April crash already made many wary of relying too much on cloud services, and the company needs to make sure it avoids losing more trust from its business customers and consumers.

We’ve asked Amazon for further comment on the crash and will update when we hear back. Other affected sites include Netflix’s streaming service, Reddit, Quora, and Turntable.fm, among many others.

According to TechCrunch, the outage only affected the EAST-1 portion of Amazon’s EC2 facility in North Virginia. That’s also where the April outage occurred, so it seems Amazon may have to deal with some ongoing issues from the previous attack.

While it was a short outage, it didn’t stop users on Twitter from noticing and loudly complaining about losing access to their favorite sites. It’s clear that many major services rely on Amazon’s cloud servers, and even minor disruptions could have a widespread impact.

Here are the updates surrounding the outage from Amazon’s EC2 status site:

-7:39 PM PDT We are investigating connectivity issues for EC2 in the US-EAST-1 region.
-7:50 PM PDT We can verify connectivity issues between instances in the US-EAST-1 region and the Internet.
-8:03 PM PDT Full connectivity has been restored. The service is operating normally.

Filed under: Business, Dev ]]> http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/09/amazon-ec2-outage/feed/ 0 Amazon suffers yet another cloud crash devindrahardawar http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/29/amazon-explains-cloud-crash/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/29/amazon-explains-cloud-crash/#comments Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:18:09 +0000 Devindra Hardawar http://venturebeat.com/?p=257074 Amazon promised a detailed postmortem of its massive Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) crash from last week, and it certainly delivered today with a nearly 6,000 word breakdown of the fiasco by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team.

But despite being …

Amazon promised a detailed postmortem of its massive Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) crash from last week, and it certainly delivered today with a nearly 6,000 word breakdown of the fiasco by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team.

But despite being more open about the problem, it still took the company around 5,700 words before it finally apologized to its customers, which included major sites and services like Foursquare, Reddit, and Quora. Amazon will be offering affected users 10 days of credit, but that certainly won’t make up for the business lost from sites that depend on it.

The post is incredibly dense and technical, but there are a few compelling points to note: Amazon says that the crash event was caused by a network configuration change, and it will make sure that similar changes in the future go smoothly. The company also says that its experience with this crash will inform how it protects its cloud service in the future.

“The issues affecting EC2 customers last week primarily involved a subset of the Amazon Elastic Block Store (“EBS”) volumes in a single Availability Zone within the US East Region that became unable to service read and write operations,” Amazon wrote. The company refers to those troublesome volumes as “stuck.”

The event has also led Amazon to reassess the structure of its Elastic Compute  Cloud (EC2), which currently consists of “Regions” (isolated sections of EC2) and “Availability Zones” (located within Regions). “Our EBS control plane is designed to allow users to access resources in multiple Availability Zones while still being tolerant to failures in individual zones. This event has taught us that we must make further investments to realize this design goal,” Amazon wrote.

The company says it will make it easier for customers to create fault tolerant services by more easily taking advantage of multiple Availability Zones. It will also host a series of webinars, free starting May 2, on how companies can better build their services for the cloud. Additionally, Amazon says it will “invest in increasing our visibility, control, and automation to recover volumes in an EBS cluster.”

Amazon also responded to complaints about its lack of communication during the event. The AWS group says that it felt that focusing its energy on fixing the problem at hand was initially more important than communication, though it recognizes now that it will need to step up with keeping customers in the loop. The company began to make more frequent updates towards the end of the cloud crash, and it will staff up its developer support team in the future to update customers. It’s also working on tools that will let you see if your Amazon service is being disrupted.

Filed under: Business ]]>

Downtime is to be expected for any web service, but the prolonged failure of Amazon’s cloud (it first went down overnight on Wednesday, April 20) is particularly painful, since so many companies rely on it for their sites and services. It serves as a reminder of the vulnerability of cloud services. Amazon had backup systems in place to prevent a scenario like this, but clearly they couldn’t foresee such a massive breakdown.

At the moment, Amazon’s infrastructure in Northern Virginia is showing the most trouble, including the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service. Here’s the latest update from Amazon’s engineers:

We’re starting to see more meaningful progress in restoring volumes (many have been restored in the last few hours) and expect this progress to continue over the next few hours. We expect that well reach a point where a minority of these stuck volumes will need to be restored with a more time consuming process, using backups made to S3 yesterday (these will have longer recovery times for the affected volumes). When we get to that point, we’ll let folks know. As volumes are restored, they become available to running instances, however they will not be able to be detached until we enable the API commands in the affected Availability Zone.

For some, Amazon’s lack of communication was their biggest problem: “Starting at 1:41 a.m. PST, Amazon’s updates read as if they were written by their attorneys and accountants who were hedging against their stated SLA rather than being written by a tech guy trying to help another tech guy,” wrote BigDoor CEO Keith Smith.

“We aren’t just sitting around waiting for systems to recover,” he continued. “We are actively moving instances to areas within the AWS cloud that are actually functioning. If Amazon had been more forthcoming with what they are experiencing, we would have been able to restore our systems sooner.”

Amazon’s Elastic Cloud is a huge collection of computing power in web-connected data centers. It hosts the web sites of a bunch of businesses and is the backbone of the web services economy, making it cheap for startups to launch and scale up a web site without having to build their own data centers.

The outage that started last night showed the vulnerability of this model, even though Amazon has backup technology in place. No word just yet on what caused the outage and what services are back up and running. So far, it looks like Scvngr is down and Foursquare is pretty slow.

Amazon has been describing the situation in its updates, and AllThingsD has a description of the services that are down.

That’s an important endorsement for Nvidia, which is trying to spread the popularity of GPU computing (GPU stands for graphics processing unit). In the past, most servers and supercomputers have used microprocessors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, which didn’t use graphics chips. But Nvidia’s CUDA programming environment makes it easier to create non-graphics applications that tap the power of graphics chip, which are very good at processing tasks in parallel.

In many applications, GPU computing can speed performance dramatically, Nvidia argues. By now, Intel should be getting a little nervous about GPU computing, as every non-graphics GPU that Nvidia sells likely displaces server chips made by Intel. Each server or supercomputer will still have microprocessors but will have fewer of them per machine.

Amazon Web Services is an important client for Nvidia because Amazon has built a huge e-commerce computing infrastructure and farms out that infrastructure to other companies via its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud offering. Now the Amazon EC2 service will offer Cluster GPU Instances, or servers with graphics chips that use Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs. That means big companies and startups alike can use GPU computing to speed the performance of their web applications. In the past, the upfront cost of GPU supercomputers has been relatively high, limiting their use to government and university applications. Those uses range from drug discovery to financial simulations.

Peter De Santis, general manager of Amazon EC2, said the addition of the power-efficient and fast GPUs will allow Amazon’s customers to come up with more innovative applications. In particular, customers can run more detailed simulations and pay for the infrastructure they use, said Andy Keane, general manager of the Tesla business at Nvidia.

In addition to the Amazon announcement, Nvidia said today that three of the top five supercomputers in the world now use Nvidia GPUs. The world’s fastest supercomputer, China’s Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which has performance of 2.507 petaflops (a measure of its precision math computing capability), uses Nvidia GPUs.

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