AWS S3 outage - what have we learned?

What has the S3 outage taught us? Even though the public cloud seems almost magical to some people it is, as a famous T-shirt points out, just someone else's computer. That's right, applications ultimately require hardware to run. No matter how many layers of abstraction, orchestration, and automation we have it still runs on a hardware infrastructure. Let that sink in for a minute... Public Cloud makes procurement and provisioning faster, but what about support? Now your application has more layers of abstraction and complexity, and it is being supported remotely in a multi-tenant environment by a person that you don't know.

There are many use cases where Public Cloud is a great fit. SaaS offerings like Microsoft Office 365 are perfect examples. The learning opportunity of the S3 outage is that just as there were issues in private data centers that caused outages, there will be outages in the public cloud as well. This will not be the last time. As long as humans are in the equation the potential for outages exists.

You've probably heard  "The answer is public cloud, what is the question?" right? Perhaps more questions should be asked before we determine where we run our workloads?

By 2016, most new IT spending will be in the cloud

Interesting article by InfoWorld. IT spend on Cloud related technologies seems to continue to rise.

By 2016, most new IT spending will be in the cloud

Transporter private cloud device

Sometimes you come across something and you say "Why didn't I think of that?". Well, I just learned of the Transporter project and that's exactly what I did. This is a fantastic idea. I liked it so much that I backed their Kickstarter project. I'll do a review If/When I receive my pair. Check it out: http://www.filetransporter.com/

 

Things to consider about the LinkedIn password hack

John P. makes good points

Thoughts on Cloud Backup adoption by the SMB market

I have read a few articles lately regarding the adoption of Cloud based backup by the SMB market. There seems to be some question as to why this adoption is accelerating. The experts like to point out that most solutions don't even offer proper version history for files. Then there are the typical performance issues of backing up and recovering data across the Internet. So what is driving this increased adoption of basic Cloud based backup within the SMB community?

In my opinion the biggest factor is something that I learned years ago when I was just out of school and found myself selling Life Insurance for New York Life. Simply put, something is better than nothing. Many SMBs have struggled with traditional methods of data protection. Many lack redundant DR locations so they have historically used local media. Tapes are a nightmare to manage. Validating backed up data by test restore is only done a fraction of the time. The IT staff in a typical SMB simply can't know or show with any certainty that their data has been backed up, is valid, and can be restored in a timely fashion to meet their SLAs. Of course there are many more advanced and expensive DP solutions that can be implemented, but remember we are talking about a small IT staff and tight budgets at your typical SMB.

Cloud based backups to the rescue. There are several positives from an SMB perspective to Cloud backup. Lower initial investment in hardware, software, and qualified staff are just a few.  Access to the data from any Internet connection versus tapes locked away inside some mountain is also extremely important. Now when the one and only Systems Admin quits the boss can still get access to the data without having to be an admin themselves. There is a certain piece of mind that comes with logging in and seeing all of the data in tact. Not to mention that it is much easier to actually perform test restores from the Cloud.

I expect to see this trend of adoption continue. I also expect that the next step past just basic data backup to the Cloud will be true Cloud based DR. Even past that you will see the SMB adopting Hybrid, Private, and even Public Cloud  models with increasing frequency. Staffs are limited, office space is at a premium, budgets are tight, and to be successful an SMB must be agile. It just makes sense.

Gladinet + S3 = piece of mind

I just finished my initial backup of my personal data to Amazon S3 and I feel at ease knowing I could lose everything here in my office, but still have my data in the cloud. Things like family photos and videos are priceless to me. Ever see anyone after a house fire? What is the one thing they always mention? Photo albums... Memories. In our family (yours too probably) we have all of our pictures, movies, and music in digital format. I have a lot of other documents and work that I have done over the years that I wouldn't want to lose as well. I am sure you feel the same way.

My cloud on boarding method of choice? First I upgraded to Gladinet Pro. This is a great little app and it was only $50. Then I added my Amazon S3 bucket to Gladinet and I was ready to create a backup job. I spent some time purging superfluous data on my Stora NAS device first. Did I mention that unlike Mozy and Carbonite my data doesn't have to reside on a local drive with this setup? Once my job was configured I let it run for about 2 days. I left the job in "instant mode" so any changes to the source data are copied to S3 immediately. Now I don't have to manage my cloud backups at all. Any new data I save to the NAS will automagically find its way to the cloud. S3 storage only costs $.14 per GB/ month which I feel is a very fair price.

I have a lot of data to backup and I wanted the security of using S3. With Gladinet you can also use any of your free cloud drives as well. Like many people I also have MS Skydrive, DropBox, Box.net, and Google Docs accounts. You can easily connect to all of these and Gladinet will automatically map a network drive letter that aggregates them all. Then you are just a backup job away from adding that extra level of offsite data storage for real piece of mind. I know I feel better. I really like this solution because it is so flexible and inexpensive. I keep all of our data on our Stora NAS device which has redundant mirrored drives. Great idea until you try to use any of the popular tools like Mozy or Carbonite. You have to pay for the business level service to be able to backup network drives. With Gladinet you can backup any network drive to any cloud drive that you chose. I'm not even going to mention how nice it is to have a local drive letter already mapped to the cloud. Ok, I just did, but seriously... Check it out for yourself. I am sure you'll have piece of mind too.

Amazon announces AWS Storage Gateway

I received the following email today from AWS. This is a pretty neat offering that will allow businesses to pretty much add AWS S3 cloud storage on demand. Not to mention the ability to use it for point-in-time backup snapshots. I haven't tried it yet, but I imagine this would also be a secure method of bridging the gap between on-prem and the cloud. Very cool stuff!

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

We’re excited to introduce the AWS Storage Gateway, a service that provides a new option to securely upload data to the AWS cloud for scalable, reliable, cost-effective storage.

The AWS Storage Gateway connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage for seamless integration between on-premises IT environments and AWS storage. The service supports a standard iSCSI interface, enabling you to take advantage of cloud based storage without re-architecting existing applications. The AWS Storage Gateway provides low-latency performance by maintaining data in your on-premises storage hardware while asynchronously uploading data over SSL to AWS, where it is encrypted and securely stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

The AWS Storage Gateway enables you to securely upload your data to the AWS cloud for cost-effective backup, storing point-in-time snapshots of your on-premises application data in Amazon S3 for future recovery. Your data in Amazon S3 is stored as Amazon EBS snapshots, which you can restore on-premises using the AWS Management Console.

The AWS Storage Gateway also makes it easy to leverage the on-demand capacity of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for additional capacity during peak periods, as a more cost-effective way to run normal enterprise workloads, or for disaster recovery purposes. You can create Amazon EBS volumes from the snapshots you’ve taken using the AWS Storage Gateway, and attach these volumes to your Amazon EC2 compute instances. Once attached, your Amazon EC2 instances will have access to this data to do any processing or computation.

Pricing for the AWS Storage Gateway is $125/month per activated gateway and comes with a 60 day free trial. Snapshot storage pricing starts at only $0.14 per gigabyte per month.

We are excited to share this announcement with you. You can learn more by visiting the AWS Storage Gateway page or joining our Feb 23 webinar.

Sincerely,
The AWS Storage Gateway Team