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Even the mighty shall sometimes cloudfail

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From the annals of Gigaom:

http://gigaom.com/2009/06/10/amazons-ec2-service-suffers-outage/

Now, If you are not a social gaming startup, but are a supply chain or POS network hosted on AWS, you can do the calculus on whether AWS uptime (excellent by any measure) is better than a solid in-house solution for mission critical infrastructure.  Maybe for some, it computes, for others maybe not.

But when the cloud fails, your alternatives have to be in place. Such as: POS systems might have a set of distributed machines to capture inbound records and route card transactions. Rapid Replenishment systems might capture transaction logs for instant replications once your cloud host comes back. You might have a set of managed APIs that broker to another cloud and then reconcile the resynch.

Many paths. However, there are some businesses that can tolerate the outages that are sure to occur as more move to remote services. One thing is for sure: The single point of failure is not just the cloud infrastructure and platform providers. The land rush to get the mid market onto PAAS solutions has been somewhat willfully blind regarding the following fact – most small /med biz has only one high speed connection, and most have not thought through the issues of hot comms failover at multiple sites.

PAAS that Gas, boys. One of the best things about hosted services in the cloud has been hardly spoken about – It’s great to have all remote offices and facilities routed to a central gateway, rather than running a mishmash of multi-point routers with arcane rules. Downside, comms. Even most SMBs in the 2-25M $$ gross revenue range have been struggling with this. It is what has made the Cisco certifications a viable IT job and created a freelance market.

Cloud insanity – the Shills come out of the woodwork

When people read my posts and comments on other great blogs regarding my opinions about rating and certifying cloud hosts, SAAS, PAAS, they sometimes think that I am 100% against cloud based soltuions. This is patently incorrect, as I routinely recommend hosted SAAS for project management, small business, budget constrained start ups, etc. What I do not recommend is that mid market businesses that have CLOB (capital line of business) applications, hosted on their own racks, or managed by a conventional, stable vendor, change to a cloud solution until the PAAS and SAAS providers get industry rating and certifications. The SNA shops knew this, and went through the in house/ hosted rating travail. The result? An industry in which any business owner can get insurance for business continuity disruption that is caused by IT systems failures. If you are a mid sized business with an internal server rack, distributed multisite architecture, or a hosted AS400 or new IBM architecture, you can insure your operations. You can insure any Redhat, Microsoft, BEA, Websphere, whatever installation, managed and rated SAS70, or hosted in your unairconditooned broom closet, but it will cost a little more. A nice underwriter will come to your place or your managed host’s place, and write a policy.

Can’t do this with the current cloud offerings. Doesn’t mean that cloud computing ain’t here to stay, but some folks take issue with me saying anything regarding the unrated and uninsured nature of the especially thinly capitalized PAAS solutions. Oy! But now, a shout out to a hero I have never met, Jane Mcarty,  – yeah! yeah! You go girl!

Jane actually puts her hands on web hosted apps, asks and applies proof of feature performance criteria in much the same way that any good CIO or upper level staffer would do with a licensed server application. Jane uncovers such simple and basic things that one says, “the PAAS vendor didn’t know that?, huh?”. Good on you, Jane.

It was on Jane’s stellar bog that I spotted a comment thread a few days old, where a shill for the cloud industry says, in so many words, that the time to question the cloud hosted apps is over, they are established and able to deliver, and that self styled analysts, like me, have NO BID-NESS asking what if the service goes down, whaaaaaa! Self hosted solutions go down. And then the commenter Russell says one of the most amazingly naive things I have ever seen in print, maybe in my entire life”: See the actual thread here.

Commenter Russell on Jane Mcarty’s blog thread”

“Many of the PaaS providers are in business with deep pockets (Force and Quickbase), well funded by professional investors (Bungee Labs), running with established management teams (Quickbase), or conservatively managed with established customer bases (WorkXpress).”

Ok, where do I begin to refuse this insanity? How about the TechCrunch.com deadpool? No? Lets start with a quote from Tref Laplante,, a principal at Workxpress.com, who says:

WorkXpress is committed to its customers and the quality of its product.  To this end it is a privately held, revenue generating company that to date has not received venture capital funding, and therefore is not under pressure to behave in ways that run counter to its mission of customers and product.” (emphasis mine).

You can see my context on this piece of Mr. LaPlante’s unassailable logic here. But, I digress. And I wish nothing but good for workxpress,com.

On the one hand, we have Russell the unknown commenter saying that VC funded PAAS platforms are an assurance and a bulwark against the vicissitudes of having a mission critical platform beyond one’s ultimate control; Partnership disputes, forced sales by the limited partners,   and raids of the venture’s bank account by coked out CEO? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Ok, got it. VC funded PAAS, though unaudited and closed to inspection, and with unknown capital reserves, is safe because is overseen by, (wait for it now) professional investors. Gawd.

On the other hand, we have a principal of a popular, (and in my opinion one of the better) PAAS shops saying that because they are NOT VC funded, they are more trustworthy, due to the fact that they are, so to speak, master baiters of their own hosted hooks and fly rods

In either case we have no idea how much runway the venture has as far as operating capital is concerned. In the case of the giants (Amazon, Intuit, Google, Gogrid, Rackspace ), when they go down, it doesn’t matter because then it is bad and you will merely get an apology and a small refund.

If your business lines are damaged, taking crucial cash flow out of your pocket, and goads the potential for civil liability (in cases of service critical business), then you are truly screwed doubly, as there are no lines of underwriting that will insure a PAAS solution for anything but the actual costs of the outage.

You people are wearing me out.

Those Sincere yet hilarious PAAS People!

By Alan Wilensky

The guys over at WorkXpress.com are doing a little business continuity reassurance work today by posting a blog article about how portable their product and data architecture is, and how that addresses issues of service continuity. Well, maybe they are new to the real issues of the CLOB application world where failover means instant recovery. I am sure they are working hard on an innovative PAAS platform, but until they understand what the AS400 services crowd understood long ago – continuity means what it says, continuous or predictable Resurrection of services within a specified time frame. As to the usability issues of WorkXpress, see Jane Mcarty’s excellent blog here.

Assuring people that your cloud, PAAS, SAAS solution is just great, is no reassurance at all – it MAY work great, and MAY be reliable MOST of the time, but, if the company and the application are not rated and certified, if your business’ books are not open to any third party (so as to ascertain liquidity) such reassurances are just whitewash. See the original WorkXpress blog post here.

My reply to their post:

“That code can be exported is comforting, but in and of itself does not comprise a complete continuity solution. If a client wants to take a work group app and trade an incumbent architecture for A PAAS, one needs seamless cut-over. Seamless fail over from PASS platform to backup boxes, or to alternative cloud hosts are non-trivial. Saying that data and platform logic is exportable is less than half the battle to CLOB (capital line of business) certified reliability.

Not one or hardly any of the PAAS vendors have been rated, certified. Saying the platform code will be in escrow is also just potential whitewash that does nothing to address the issue of imminent failover. WorkExpress might be a great platform, but merely stating: “WorkXpress is committed to its customers and the quality of its product. To this end it is a privately held, revenue generating company that to date has not received venture capital funding, and is not under pressures to behave in ways that counter to its mission of customers and product…” The foregoing merely says in other words that that Workxpress is unrated by any third party that audits reliability. You guys might have a great product, but for the mission critical CLOB applications, you are in the same boat as any other unrated, unaudited PAAS platform.”

If you are contemplating going the PAAS route, and handing not only your data, but your operations to an unaudited third party that proudly states that they are “privately capitalized and profitable, therefore good for you!”, be careful, very careful indeed.

Specialty Product Domains

Do you have hosted (SAAS, PAAS, Cloud) tools and apps that are mired in the Web 2.0 freemium swamp? Minor modifications to features and market-specific messaging can re-target your products towards real, paying client constituencies. Yes, you can get paid for real web-based productivity applications. Technical services, equipment maintenance, Test and Measurement, fleet services. Target, get perspective, broaden your product horizons with my services. Let me help you save that code base.

Lets say your company has a web application (or any software system) that might have the potential to cross over from the horizontal to the specialty vertical or technical industrial markets, but you are not sure how to approach the sector for validation or go-to-market? What is the potential market volume, who influences, certifies, what features need modification? Let’s go.

Let’s say you have a lead that someone, some company needs a jump start into a specialty technical market, such as product service, supply chain, etc. Get me a referral and I will pay you 20% off the top of my contract. Hire me on contract to provide contract management services, and I will lop off 15% of my standard rate.

What do you do, anyway?

I realized of late that when people asked what I do professionally, my fast repartee was not clear enough. This is all fine when the tech sector is booming and the referrals are flying in. However, when things slow down, like now, we can't take any chances. So what do I do, exactly? A review of all of my on-line professional profiles showed a ghastly mishmash.

This is what I do:

I currently work for Product Managers as a strategic sector helper.

I evaluate vertical and technical B2B sectors prior to my client PM's pulling the development trigger. I provide specific steering (mid dev time-line) on what features need to be tweaked, what market approaches need sector-specific massaging, and all that trade org liaison work that few want to do.

I spot hot trends where consumer web app waves might cross over into a profitable vertical where the users pay for the service.

I make the right calls at the right time, delivering cogent written and oral advice to your management; I almost never miss when creating value, fostering partnerships, and creating the groundwork for new products and innovation.

My rates are more than reasonable considering the stakes, and I never drag a contract out, usually wrapping in less than 6 months.