Sunday, January 20, 2008

Evidence of pending doom and imminent salvation...

Two news articles that occurred as soon as I went offline for the birth of my daughter provide increasing evidence of the importance of service level automation and image portability between vendors:

  • Joyent, one of the most ambitious new "capacity on demand" managed hosting services, has experienced a multi-day outage that has affected two of their prime storage services. No failover path was available to users of the services, and there is no mention of functionality or services to assist customers with moving--temporarily or permanently--to another vendor's service. Odds are high that some of these customers have lost access to key data, or are flying without substantial backups to key systems. Any decision to move to a different servers (like Twitter will according to the post) is on the customer's own dime.

    A prime example of the dangers of vendor lock-in that Simon and I have been warning you about...


  • Oracle has announced its intention to build and sell "Grid 2.0" technology that will target--yes, you heard right--service level automation. Welcome to the SLAuto game boys. I hope you're ready to talk standards for image and policy portability; as well as policy platform interoperability. Otherwise, you're just creating a new DB grid "silo", and not helping anyone in the long run. Please, feel free to educate me if you think otherwise...

These events show the caution that users of cloud services must employ. Be ready to take on increased integration responsibilities as you deploy more and more elements of your datacenter to the cloud, automate more of the management of those elements, and find the product landscape one in which there (still) is no silver bullet. You may not be writing apps, but you sure as heck will be writing the orchestration that will tie the apps you employ into a cohesive business process ecosystem. You may also find yourself writing backup integration again, just in case you experience "Joyent 2.0"...

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