AWS's unexplained reboot degrades Trust, Wake up and Focus on Improving Trust

AWS is secretive about its running of AWS.  Last night I saw that AWS was going to reboot a bunch of their EC2 instances on friday.

Yikes: Big Amazon Web Services reboot on the way Friday

by Barb Darrow

10 HOURS AGO

2 Comments

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photo: Shutterstock / Zalstolskiy Victor

SUMMARY:

Many Amazon Web Services customers will soon be subjected to a reboot of their EC2 instances — but no one outside of AWS knows why.

This morning others in the press spread the news.

AWS users fret over downtime ahead of Amazon's massive EC2 reboot ZDNet - ‎2 hours ago‎ Some AWS users have also expressed concern on the AWS user forum that they've been given too short notice to monitor services that may be affected during the maintenance event. Meanwhile, others have commended AWS for forcing a reboot at the ...    AWS issuing 'urgent patch' to EC2 instances Computer Business Review - ‎1 hour ago‎ AWS has said that not all instances of the impacted instance types will be rebooted. 2. If you relaunch an instance before the maintenance, you are not guaranteed to get an already-patched host." T1, T2, M2, R3, and HS1 instance types will not be affected.    Cue The Cloud Naysayers--Amazon Web Services Set To Nuke Bulk Servers Forbes - ‎9 hours ago‎ The details, according to Von Eicken, are that Amazon Web Services (AWS) notified its customers today, Sept 24, that it will be rolling out an urgent patch to all hosts causing a maintenance reboot of nearly all EC2 instances starting September 26, 2014 and ...

So what is the big deal?  There is speculation the reboot is for security issues.  Whatever is the reason Amazon is not saying now.

Does this improve or degrade trust in Amazon?  

Don’t you think the messaging would be different if Amazon focused on improving trust in its cloud?

The more you know the less you can say

I find more and more there is less I can say about data centers in a blog post.  Why?  Because I am finding so many times what is promoted as new is old and has been said before or what is new is not that interesting.

Do you find that some of the people who say the most know the least?

Something to ponder.

“The more you know the less you can say” is followed by what type of people?

A conversation I wish I could have, Bill Loeffler a Microsoft Cloud Architect passed away Sept 2014

A friend forwarded the news that Bill Loeffler passed away from melanoma this month at the age of 54.

The friend asked if I knew Bill, and yes I had many conversations on the concept of Infrastructure Patterns for IT in my Microsoft days.  Bill and I connected on LinkedIn 5 years ago, but he was based in NYC, so it didn’t seem convenient to chat about his work and mine.  

Bill has posted some good content on building a Cloud Infrastructure.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/5711.private-cloud-infrastructure-as-a-service-self-service.aspx

Private Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Self Service

Self Service capability is a characteristic of private cloud computing and must be present in any implementation. The intent is to permit users to approach a self-service capability and be presented with options available for provisioning in an organization. The capability may be basic provisioning of a virtual machine with a pre-defined configuration or may be more advanced allowing configuration options to the base configuration and leading up to a platform capability or service.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4633.what-is-infrastructure-as-a-service.aspx 

What is Infrastructure as a Service?

In defining Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), we need to drill into specific characteristics that a cloud platform provider must provide to be considered Infrastructure as a Service. This has been no easy task as nearly every cloud platform provider has recently promoted features and services designed to address the IaaS and cloud computing market. Fortunately, as the technology has evolved, a definition of cloud computing has emerged from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

I looked up some of our shared connections on LinkedIn and I should set some time aside to chat about Bill.

Google Expands to 5 Data Center Locations in Europe, 5 is a magic number

Google posted on data center expansion on Tues Sept 23.  It is late Weds Sept 24 so the announcement is old news.  There are two paragraphs that are interesting.

There will be 5 Google data centers operating in Europe.  5 is a minimum to have extremely high availability.  Some my think 2 or 3 is the right number.  When you think through operations 5 is a much better number than three.  The Five are Dublin, Hamina, St Ghislain, Eemshaven (rented) and Eemshaven (owned).

This will be Google’s fourth hyper efficient facility in Europe. Importantly, demand for Internet services remains so strong that the new building does not mean a reduction in expansion elsewhere. Our expansion will continue in Dublin in Ireland, in Hamina in Finland, and in St. Ghislain in Belgium. Our existing rented datacenter facility in Eemshaven also will continue to operate.

Google makes the statement there is expansion in all the owned facilities - Dublin, Hamina, and St. Ghislain.

The other paragraph says that Google has new data centers designs it is building.

The new Dutch data centre will benefit from the latest designs in cooling and electrical technology. It will be free-cooled - taking advantage of natural assets like cool air and grey water to keep our servers cool. Our data centers use 50% less energy than a typical datacenter - and our intention is to run this new facility on renewable energy.

Intent is to run the facility on renewable energy.  Yippeee!!!  Go Green Data Centers

Any more details?  Nope.  Google is growing fast.  Is it growing faster than the rest?  I would say yes.

7 things wrong with Technology Conferences/tradeshows

I’ve gone to lots of data center events and a lot of technology events.  It is time for some changes.  Before change it is good to know what is frustrating to so many of us.

Here is list of 7 things that I find occur more often than I would like.

#1)  Public Relations staff at the event and companies limit what is presented, therefore discussed.

#2)  Event schedule is too dense.

#3)  Venue is not set up for discussions, so the best place to meet is the bar.

#4)  Too many presentations are not that good.

#5)  What is called a presentation is a sales pitch.

#6)  Conference is organized to service sponsors, not the attendees.

#7)  The event is boring.

Now imagine an industry event that tries to address all 7 of these issues.  That would be an event worth attending.