Service Computing: Azure

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Google excludes scheduled maintenance from its Google Apps SLA, but not Google App Engine

Back in July of 2010, I wrote about how Cloud Service Providers exclude scheduled downtime from their service level agreements. Last Friday, Google made a significant change to their SLA for Google Apps by removing scheduled downtime from their Google Apps SLA:

Exclusion of scheduled downtime from availability SLA
Exclusion of intermittent downtime (periods of less than 10 minutes) from availably SLA

Obviously, it is good news for Google Apps customers. It highlights Google’s infrastructure & operational maturity (in this case, for Google Apps specifically).

I also think the announcement is important, because it sets a higher standard for service delivery. By raising the bar, Google also intensifies competitive pressure on service providers such as Microsoft to offer more robust Cloud services. Ultimately, both customers & the industry should benefit from this.

However, as I discussed in my July post, for infrastructure & platform services such as Google App Engine for Business, scheduled maintenance still remains excluded in all SLAs:

It is 2011. If we mark the beginning of Cloud Computing by the initial public release of EC2 (2006), I think enough time has passed for Cloud service providers to do a better job of managing planned outages in a non-service-disruptive way.

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Sidebar - I am a regular user of AWS, GAE, Force.com… I have been using these services for more than a couple of years. To be fair, I have never received any emails from any of the major cloud for scheduled downtime. I have received a few from other service providers. So, I would say that they are all doing a pretty good job operationally (a lot better than probably what most enterprises would do), and make sure the services are always up, and almost always perform well :-]. So, they just have it in the SLA agreements for legal protection & liability.

Never-the-less, when it comes to migrating or designing enterprise solutions, depending on the application type and use-case, this can become an issue, and require both technical implementation & operations planning.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

A quick & dirty look at web traffic trends on AWS, Azure, Force.com, GAE, and IBM Dev/Test cloud

Since the introduction of EC2 in 2005/2006, a lot has happened. New service providers such as Google App Engine (GAE) and Force.com have emerged. Existing hosting providers such as GoGrid & RackSpace have transformed to cloudify their service delivery model. And, existing platform vendors such as IBM and Microsoft have raced to implement or acquire solutions to respond to this fundamental shift.

Different types of vendors are competing for market positions. Some are new: Abiquo, Nimbula, Cloud.com (formerly VMOps)… And, some are mature: VMware, Novell/Attachmate, CA, BMC, DELL, … [The vendor landscape is big and complex, and includes other types of vendors including systems integrators…]

As we close 2010, I thought it would be interesting to look at some usage trends of the big names in the Cloud market.

The statistics come from Alexa. It uses its own methods for capturing HTTP traffic, and normalizing the data. As such, it is important to note that it does not include non-web app workload deployed on these cloud services. In addition, it is common for enterprises to use DNS aliasing (CNAME) to map to a custom URL. So, it is important to consider traffic to custom URLs would not be included in the following presentation.

Comparing aws, azure, force, gae, and ibm

View more presentations from babak hosseinzadeh.

The intent is to provide some ideas about usage and future trends, as these vendors battle it out for dominance and market share.

Please send me any comments or questions at babakh@yahoo.com.

Wish everyone a Happy New Year!