Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: EC2

George Reese on “The Cloud’s Shining Moment,” Four Days Later

ShiningMoment-Cloud_370w 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. GeorgeReeeseHis 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)

Download here

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.

 

How to Get Buzz for Your Startup Launch: Write a Book!

Okay, not everyone can pull this off.  But one experienced Minneapolis tech entrepreneur, George Reese, is doing it in a big way with a new book on "cloud computing."  What's cloud computing, you ask?  Did you just come out from under a rock?   If you're involved in any way in IT, even on the fringes of it, you've been blasted for months with an almost endless amount of media coverage and discussion about this topic — a recent example being on the front page of The Wall Street Journal the other day.  Even most casual Internet users are now aware that many of their consumer web apps are accessed "in the cloud," as opposed to being software they install on their own computers. Google's Gmail is probably the best known example of that.

George Reese is cofounder of a new Minneapolis startup, enStratus, GeorgeReese-headshotand is right smack in the middle of all the buzz. 
Thanks to his new book, which he worked on for six months, he's in a great position to help clear the air surrounding a lot of the cloud computing hype that's flying around out there now.  He's especially interested in helping enterprises that are looking to take advantage of the economic benefits of this form of corporate IT. 

GeorgeReese-book-200w
On April 10, George's new book will be released by O'Reilly Media:  "Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud."  And here's the Amazon link.  It's now available at both these links for pre-ordering. I've known George since 2006, in relation to his previous startup, Valtira (a SaaS marketing platform), from which enStratus is being spun out.  (I also know David Bagley, the CEO of Valtira, who's the other cofounder of enStratus.)  I thought it would be fun to get George's thoughts about this uber-hot topic of cloud computing, and hear the story behind his book.  This is an interview I conducted with him earlier this week, which first appeared on the cloud computing site Cloud Ave. and, later, on our own Minnesota tech news site, Minnov8.

Graeme:  How long have you been involved with cloud computing, and what made you decide to write this book?

George:  I suppose that depends on what you mean when you say "cloud computing." I've been developing SaaS systems for the past five years, but got into Amazon Web Services and Infrastructure as a Service in late 2007 when my company Valtira needed an alternate approach to a high-availability infrastructure. During this time, I've developed a body of experience in putting transactional database applications into the Amazon Cloud.  My editor at O'Reilly, with whom I've written several books in the past, heard I was doing cloud work and asked me to put together a book on the subject.

Graeme:  Why is cloud computing gaining adoption like it is?  What is its attraction?  We know Internet and IT startups love it, but do you think it will catch on in any significant way with larger enterprises?

George:  The primary attractions to cloud computing are cost and flexibility. Cloud computing enables you to build out a world-class IT infrastructure with no up-front capital investment and pay for the growth of your infrastructure as the business it is supporting grows.

I believe enterprise IT has a strong need for the benefits of cloud computing, but they have higher expectations with respect to reliability and scalability than startups. My company enStratus is all about dealing with these two concerns for enterprise IT, and I talk a lot about that in the book.

Graeme:  For what types of readers did you primarily write the book? What will they get from it that they can't get elsewhere?

George:  The book is for people tasked with making the move into the cloud and guiding them through that move. I start by establishing what the cloud means from my perspective and what its value is to an organization. The book covers how you evaluate what makes sense to move into the cloud and, once the decision is made, the security, availability, and disaster recovery planning necessary to operate at an enterprise level in the cloud.

Graeme:  Do you deal in the book with the issue of choosing a cloud computing provider? In not, why not?  Do you attempt to compare providers?

George:  No. Anything I might say in the way of a comparison would be out of date by the time the book hit the shelves. Jeff Barr from Amazon reviewed the book for technical accuracy, and E.J. Johnson from Rackspace and Randy Bias from GoGrid both provided appendices describing their offerings.

Graeme:  What are some of the other key issues you deal with in the book, such as security and reliability of the cloud?  And what does the book deliver that's not available elsewhere?

George:  Given my role at enStratus, cloud security and reliability are obviously key concerns of mine. I spend an entire chapter on security issues and cover how to architect your applications for maximum availability throughout the book. I have not seen much of this kind of talk available on the Internet; mostly warnings about how security and availability are things you should worry about.

Graeme:  Readers of the book will also learn about the management tools you have developed for use in your own company, Valtira, which offers a SaaS marketing platform. Please tell us how those tools led to the formation of a separate, spinoff company.

George:  Valtira was looking to build out a new service offering that required a high-availability infrastructure. We priced out a managed services infrastructure to support our needs, but that proved too costly for a new product offering. We then turned to the Amazon cloud to see if it would meet our needs. We ran into a number of obstacles along the way. Some of these obstacles have since been addressed by Amazon through new service offerings like Elastic Block Storage. For other obstacles, we built out tools to take care of things. It turns out that people who were not Valtira customers really wanted our tools, so we spun them out into enStratus.

Graeme:  You began working on the book many months ago. The release of the book seems now to be right at a time of intense focus on cloud computing, undoubtedly driven in part by current economic conditions.  What's your take on all the hype?

George:  Cloud computing is the most disruptive technology to hit business since the Web. It's not hype. Like any disruptive technology, however, there's a lot of misinformation flying around. To make matters worse, every person has a different internal definition of "the cloud" that frames their discussions on the subject. So, the hype is warranted, but everyone needs to pay particular attention to context and definitions in their discussions.

Graeme:  With the book's release, your speaking schedule is naturally heating up.  Please tell us where people can find you in coming weeks and months.

George:  Well, first, I'll be presenting at CloudCamp in New York City on April 1. Following that, O'Reilly has a webcast on "Getting Started with Amazon Web Services" scheduled for April 8.  In Minneapolis, I'll be speaking at the Minnesota High Tech Association's spring conference on April 15, and then at CloudCamp Minneapolis/St. Paul on April 18 at the U of MN.  Recently, my company enStratus was chosen as a presenting startup at the Under the Radar conference in Mountain View, CA, on April 24.  The following month, I'll be speaking on the topic of information privacy and security in the cloud at the Glue Conference in Denver on May 12. Then it's off to London, where I'll be speak on May 15 at WebTech Exchange 2009 on the topic of hardening an EC2 infrastructure.

Graeme:  That definitely qualifies as a whirlwind, George! Thanks for taking some time to tell us about your book, and I look forward to seeing you at some of these upcoming events.

By the way, follow George on Twitter @GeorgeReese and his company's tweets @enStratus.

(Disclosure: the author has a consulting relationship with enStratus.)