In the last two weeks of June two power interruptions in one of Amazon’s US data centres resulted in outages for some of its AWS customers. The internet and in particular Twitter were awash with people passing comment or, in the case of some of those affected, bemoaning the impact.  Post mortems followed – and discussions on the web continue. Some customers moved their services back Continue Reading

A fellow blogger suggested blogging on what had happened to me over the previous week, and although getting drunk and eating too much would probably make a great post, it doesn’t quite fit with this site, so….

….I have to talk about Cloud Orchestration and Automation.

In the first instance I think it might be worthwhile level setting some ground rules around Orchestration and Automation Continue Reading

As part of my day job I regularly come across a wide range of multi-disciplined individuals who all have skills and experiences that I can only hope to one day match. They come from all sorts of backgrounds and have a plethora of views and visions of not only the end game but also the approach needed to ensure a successful implementation of the holistic IT department of the future.

Through their enthusiasm and desire to ‘fix’ legacy IT they sometimes fail to recognise that they are all working towards the same end goal, that in fact by working together and learning from each other and taking the best aspects of each others frameworks, definitions, libraries and experiences we can deliver true Cloud Computing solutions. The IT industry is maturing and we have a number of proven techniques to ensure that we meet business requirements, address operational processes and deliver robust solutions.

It is only now as part of Cloud Computing are we seeing many of these come together. Cloud Computing is not only a set technologies, or just some service management, process re-engineering, high level architecture definitions or Infrastructure delivered on-demand to meet your businesses IT processing requirements.

Cloud Computing is all of these any more.

With Chris Chant announcing his imminent departure, is this where the G-Cloud programme turns into what many have claimed it always was…vapour?

In being so forthright with his views on what is acceptable and, far more clearly, what is unacceptable, Chris has doubtlessly alienated large parts of the traditional Systems Integrator community who have been waiting for the moment to get their revenge.  Some will be thinking that the time is right. 

I will bet that they’re wrong.  Chris has established a strong and vocal community of support for G-Cloud and that support will continue under the watchful eyes of Liam Maxwell, Continue Reading

More and more business leaders are understanding the financial benefits that can be delivered by leveraging Cloud Computing. IT Consultants, Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s), Value Added Resellers (VAR’s) and Systems Integrators (SI’s) are beginning to comprehend the technical, service and operational aspects of Cloud Computing. Cloud based software companies are becoming synonymous with Cloud Computing and when discussing business application strategies share a common ground with legacy vendors.

When a business is setting it’s IT (or Cloud) Strategy it needs to understand the benefits and risks associated with the Private and Public Cloud models. Where should it look to provision business services from in terms of data security, reliability, Continue Reading

Before I start this set of posts I feel the need to qualify my background. I spent my first 5 years in IT as a Mainframe operator before progressing to Open Systems, in particular IBM AIX (POWER) and HP HP-UX (PA-RISC) based systems. My first real foray into x86 (Intel) based processing came with the advent of Linux and in particular SuSE (now SLES).

I was often lambasted for being anti-Microsoft by colleagues, although they never seemed to realise that I had no real dislike of the Microsoft organisation, rather I could perform most of the ‘services’ each of the 30-40 W-Intel servers provided from a single UNIX, in my case AIX, server. I never understood the rationale of one ‘service’ one ‘server’ that seemed to be prevalent within the Microsoft W-Intel team.

So it isn’t as a W-Intel advocate that I write these posts, rather as a mature Mainframe/Open Systems Enterprise Architect who can recognise a business benefit when he sees it.

So what is the benefit I can see? Continue Reading