Four Indicators to Measure Your Cloud Operations

When you drive a car, you will want to know how fast you are driving, how many fuel is left, and whether your engine is normal. That's where the dashboard plays an important role. The same is true for your cloud operations. In order for a cloud administrator to know whether the cloud is running …

End To End Service Level Management – A Key to Your Cloud Success.

Recently, I visited several large service providers who are rolling out their cloud offerings. One common question from them how they can measure the service level agreement in a way that not only they know its financial impact but also  its operations impact. The operations impact they meant is how they can operationally measure, maintain, and report …

Open Source Engine Powering the Next Gen. Cloud Stack – Part 1

Recently there have been a flood of announcements in the Cloud Computing space that have heartened the Open Source community. This is particularly important to ensure large adoption of some of the guts of the cloud computing stack. This post will examine some of these announcements in the light of building an entire stack of …

Enterprise IT Put Their Eye On Cloud Operations Management Solutions

Every year, we have several customer advisory meetings where we meet a group of our customers to share our progress and vision, but most importantly to seek valuable feedback from them on whether we are addressing their biggest challenges in our coming releases. Last time, when we asked members of advisory board what would they …

The Momentum You Can’t Ignore

Two years ago, cloud computing was just a new concept. To some extend, many enterprises were still skeptical. The industry was still trying to figure out whether the cloud is a technology, a marketing term,  or a business model. And Larry had a fun to bash it. He was sarcastic at that time. But he …

How Does Operations Management Evolve in the Cloud ? Part 2

Part 2 - 6 Capabilities in the New Generation of Cloud Operations Management In part 1 of this topic, I talked about the paradigm shifting from boxes, applications, and ownership in the classic data center  to the new cloud model where pools, services, and sharing drive the operations and delivers the powerful values. In this part, I want …

Thunderstorm from Amazon Reminded Us the Importance of Weather Forecast

Photo used under Creative Commons from lurw On April 21st, 2011, a thunderstorm hit the Amazon AWS. This storm lasted almost 4 days (timeline documented by @ericmkidd). Later, Amazon AWS team posted a detailed post-mortem analysis on what happened. It turned out an incorrect network configuration action caused the traffic redirected to the lower capacity redundant EBS network. This network is …

How Does Operations Management Evolve in the Cloud ? Part 1

Part 1 - What's So Unique About the Cloud? When I talked to customers, I got often asked why the operations management in Cloud is different in their existing data center. This seems to be an innocent but actually is a very important question. To answer that question, we need to examine what is so …

Flying With the Jet Stream

Last year, when I flew back from Shanghai to San Francisco Bay Area, I looked outside through the window and saw there are  beautiful clouds under the wing of our plane. It looked so quietly and peacefully. What I didn't see was that we were actually flying with a jet stream that gave us 3 hours …