Category: Interviews (Page 9 of 13)
The major Amazon Web Services outage that began this past Thursday morning was unlike anything before it. Countless AWS customers, big and small, went down, many for days. Surprisingly, other biggies like Netflix, SmugMug, and Twilio had little or no disruption. One hungers to know why…
Over the weekend, George Reese, a cloud expert and author (and CTO of cloud-management tools company enStratus), wrote a fascinating post on O’Reilly about what some would call a cloud disaster — entitling it, ironically enough, “The Cloud’s Shining Moment.” George has a unique perspective on the cloud, and a large following. His post got huge play, and that continues — so I decided to message him on Twitter and set up a coffee so I could interview him Monday morning. I was anxious for him to elaborate on his post and share more of his thoughts, now that the outage is (mostly) behind us.
Click on the link below to hear the whole chat. What follows here are some snippets from that 30-minute conversation (it was recorded in a busy coffee shop, so there’s background noise, but you can hear us fine):
• Thursday at 3:00 am: “We knew something significant was going down.”
• What happened, who was affected, and why.
• What about SLAs? “They’re not an insurance policy, they’re a refund policy… SLAs are a joke.”
• The “Design for Failure” approach vs. traditional application architecture gives you “control over your own destiny.”
• Why the AWS outage was a shining moment: it’s about learning what you can do in the face of an event like this. “So many survived.”
• The “cloud haters” came out after the O’Reilly post. Flame wars erupted in the comments. George pre-empted what they thought was, ahem, their shining moment… 🙂
• In large corporations, the “Department of No” is the real problem.
• George guarantees that CIOs who say their companies are not in the cloud actually are, and just don’t know it. Many others realize the cloud “genie is out of the bottle,” and are now coming to his firm, to be their window into what’s really going on in the cloud.
• George’s company now makes it possible to do “cross-cloud” backup and disaster recovery. Not only can customers do automated DR, but automated DR testing, too.
• He says his company is at “the most important point” in its life and the evolution of the cloud. In the last six months, “enterprise has gotten it.” He noted that he’s never spoken to so many Fortune 100 companies as he has in the past week.
Download or listen to my interview of George Reese, CTO of enStratus … (MP3)
Two other excellent blog posts we touched on that came out over the weekend:
• “How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse,” by Don MacAskill, Cofounder & Chief Geek
• “Seven lessons to learn from Amazon’s outage,” by Phil Wainewright, ZDnet
UPDATE: Here’s another good one:
• “An unofficial EC2 outage postmortem – the sky is not falling,” on the CloudHarmony Blog (caution: you have to really want to take a deep dive into cloud storage)
(Here’s more about my interview subject: George Reese has been delivering software as a service since 2003 when he founded Valtira, a suite of web-based marketing tools. Prior to Valtira, George held a variety of technology leadership roles with J. Walter Thompson, Carlson Marketing Group, and startups Ancept and Imaginet. George is the author of several O’Reilly books on Internet and enterprise technologies, including Java Database Best Practices and Managing and Using MySQL and the recently released Cloud Application Architectures. He has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.A. in Philosophy from Bates College in Lewiston, ME. Follow him on Twitter @georgereese.)
Full Disclosure: As mentioned during the recorded interview, the writer had a consulting relationship with enStratus in 2009.
Did you know 30% of voicemail messages remain unheard for three days or more? And here I thought it was just me. A company with the rather different name of "Life Is Better ON" provides that stat. It also cites a survey finding 38% of Americans don't like voicemail because they have to listen to long, rambling messages.
So, what does this outfit have to fix the situation? A Twitter-like voicemail system that limits you to speaking only 140 characters? Well, no — but maybe better: their "ON Voicefeed" service is a free iPhone app that enhances your exchanges with family, friends, and colleagues by creating customized groups and personalized voicemail messages. (The app is available now in the country App Stores in the UK and France, and it's coming in a matter of days to the US App Store.)
This is visual voicemail on steroids, folks! And it's all cloud-based. Listen to Giles Corbett, a Brit with a really smooth radio voice, tell you all about ON Voicefeed. He's director and head of the "ON" service, which was developed by Orange Valle, a subsidiary, founded in 2008, of the Paris-based Orange Group, a part of France Telecom. Here's the video of Giles' on-stage demo, and be sure to check out the props his sidekick was sporting.
DEMO, DEMOspring2011, #democon, @DEMO, startups, launch, pitches, pitching, VC, venture capital, angel investors, tech trends, mobile, social, cloud, video chat, apps, mobile apps, web apps, iPhone
Just had to stop and talk to the Aussies when I heard they were at DEMO! I kidded them beforehand via Twitter that I was coming over for a Vegemite sandwich (they had a very active tweetmaster at the helm!) I was delighted to learn they'd just opened a Palo Alto office. MobileNation came all the way from the other side of the world to pitch their technology for letting anyone build a custom mobile app (whether for smartphone or tablet). It has a very nice, intuitive drag-and-drop visual interface.
I spoke with John Hummelstad, Chairman (at left in the photo), who proceeded to do a visual demo for me on his large monitor, even though I was only recording audio… :-) But I just let him run with it, figuring you could always view the video of their on-stage demo later. (And here's that video.) MobileNation's app-building technology is free for anyone to use, but the company will make money from charging enterprises to use it for their purposes.
• Download or listen to my interview of John Hummelstad, Chairman of MobileNation … (MP3)
My next stop was the stand of flyRuby.com, which says it's the first and only Internet marketplace for private jet travelers to search, compare, and pay for jet charter service online. I wanted to chat with the young CEO and founder, Michael Leek, who told us on stage he's an Eagle Scout — and a former Marine. So, really now, think about it: how hard could starting an Internet company be then?
The guy gets out of the Marines only five years ago, then thinks about what he wants to do next. He goes and identifies an unmet market need, then hustles two angel investors for $350k. Get this: he found there are seven million monthly Google searches related specifically to air charter and, *not one single site* lets you book a charter online — that is, till flyRuby launched publicly on Monday.
Right on, Michael! Storm the beaches, baby — Semper Fi. I got a kick out of how he implied on stage (video here) that many in the audience weren't his market, and I could swear he was looking at the press section when he said that… :-) But, hey, if I win the lottery, I know right where I'm going to book my next air travel — screw commercial!
• Download or listen to my interview of Michael Leek, founder of flyRuby.com … (MP3)
Recent Comments