_Once upon a time, a network engineer scrawled an amorphous shape upon a whiteboard and wrote “Internet” thereon.  The amorphous circle, a ‘cloud’, soon became the de facto way that we represent “not my problem”, or outsourcing.  Hence, the “cloud” in cloud computing means that cloud is predominantly an outsourcing...

Some exciting news on the open cloud front.  Nicira’s openvswitch (think: open source Cisco Nexus 1000V) made it in as the default vSwitch in the latest release of the Xen Cloud Platform.  For those who aren’t aware, the Xen Cloud Platform is an open source provider/cloud-focused management framework for clouds....

We’re a little late in posting this due to the holidays, but I have some exciting stats to share with you.  In 2009 the Cloudscaling blog became one of the hottest destinations for cloud knowhow.  A big part of that success was our unique perspective on cloud computing.  We aren’t...

Over a year and a half ago, I mentioned that there were four key aspects to cloud computing: scalability, leverage, speed, and reach.  All of these still hold true today.  In particular, the one area that was underdeveloped was the notion of using clouds for global reach. As you know,...

Just in time for the New Year, we’re releasing a short 12 page whitepaper on building Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.  This whitepaper is targeted at folks building public or private clouds who want to understand our general take on clouds, cloud computing, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service.  In particular, we highlight some of the...

It’s important to understand the potential differences between virtual server disk drives and physical disk drives, so I wanted to post a very brief blog on the topic.  For this article I’ve chosen to compare the performance of an iSCSI SAN on Gigabit Ethernet to a single SATA disk drive....

Amazon hasn’t been forthcoming since my last post on their control and control objectives, which is disappointing, but expected.  I still believe that transparency here is more important than security through obscurity.  Hiding the controls and control objectives doesn’t provide much in the way of particular security benefits, although I’m...

At first glance it seems like Amazon’s recent announcement of a successful SAS70 audit is grounds for celebration[1]. Certainly it has met with fanfare on Twitter and blogs. Unfortunately, a SAS70 audit isn’t what most people think it is. Worse yet, Amazon’s reluctance to provide details of the audit provides...

I recently gave a short, 5-minute ‘lightning talk’ at Cloud Camp in the Clouds.  This is the first ‘virtual’ (online) event for the Cloud Camp folks.  I want to particularly thank the organizers Reuven Cohen, Dave Nielsen, and Sam Charrington for allowing me to give our perspective and also to let us...

Today I’m going to tell you how much revenue Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is generating. After all, you, my regular readers, come to this blog for its insight, original thinking, and gems of wisdom. Today I have something particularly juicy for you: real-world numbers on Amazon’s EC2 size and...