Brian Parsons

I’ve been reading about slow growth for Rackspace cloud and how apps are pulling support. I shouldn’t be so surprised given that my own usage of the Rackspace cloud has also dwindled, despite the ORD datacenter being one of the most rock solid facilities I have ever used. I know that Rackspace has spent the last few years working hard and innovating, but somehow they seem to still be missing the boat. Here is a list of key things that made me go back to AWS and that Rackspace can implement to reverse this trend.

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I have an updated Arch Linux image for Amazon EC2 that is systemd. I created a boot script that sets the hostname and root keys. It will even update DNS in Route53 and send you an email letting you know the instance IP.

Released under the MIT license on github.

I am working on cleaning up the base image that I use on Amazon EC2 and publishing the AMI as well.

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Rackspace has put out a nice infographic highlighting what IT decision makers are looking for as well as what they are concerned about when it comes to cloud.

Rackspace® — Rogue IT, Cloud Lock-In Dominate Cloud Concerns [INFOGRAPHIC]

Cloud Computing is not just a paradigm shift for infrastructure. IT operations, accounting and even staffing structure need to be updated to effectively harness the benefits.

In a previous article I illustrated deploying a multi-terrabyte RAID array in the cloud. That takes just a few minutes these days but it used to take most organizations over a month to provision that much storage through their IT channel. Moving to cloud will allow organizations to reduce and potentially eliminate IT staffing around procurement.

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While I haven’t *knock on wood* had any EBS failures in Amazon’s cloud myself, I have heard the horror stories and that makes me uneasy. Another issue with disks in cloud that I do run into a lot is latency. The disk io in many cases is slower to begin with, and random bouts of latency tend to crop up.

I have addressed both of these problems by deploying RAID 10 on my Amazon EC2 instances. It sounds techie but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do this. If you are managing an EC2 instance you can do it and I have published a script that will get you there in a few steps.

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“Plan for failure” is not a new mantra when it comes to information technology. Evaluating the worst case scenario is part of defining system requirements in many organizations. The mistake that many are making when they start to implement cloud is that they don’t re-evaluate their existing architecture and the economics around redundancy.

All organizations make trade-offs between cost and risk. Having truly fully redundant architecture at all levels of the system is usually seen as unduly expensive. Big areas of exposure like databases and connectivity get addressed but some risk is usually accepted.

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Discussions about cloud computing security often fail to distinguish general issues from cloud-specific issues.

Here is a great overview from Security & Privacy IEEE magazine of common IT vulnerabilities and how they are impacted by the new cloud paradigm.

The article starts off defining vulnerability in general and then goes on to establish the vulnerabilities that are inherent in cloud computing models.

It really boils down to access:

Of all these IAAA vulnerabilities, in the experi­ence of cloud service providers, currently, authentica­tion issues are the primary vulnerability that puts user data in cloud services at risk

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Permanent Link — Posted in Cloud Computing , Security

Data Center Knowledge has posted a great article illuminating the effect that cloud computing is having on the economics of disaster recovery (DR) for information technology. Having fast DR used to mean adding a large considerable expense to your IT budget in order to “duplicate” what you have.

Using cloud technologies not only is this less expensive, but is a great first step towards transitioning IT infrastructure into the cloud paradigm.

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The Charlotte Observer published an article on how cloud computing is changing the roles around in IT. Just knowing hardware and desktop support won’t be enough!

Cloud computing to alter workforce