Photograph by Jason Whitman - nationalgeographic.com

There was another AWS outage this weekend. Did you hear about it? Your boss probably did. In fact it was the second outage inside of a month and took out some pretty big-name services like Netflix, Instgram and Pinterest … your boss probably heard about that too.

Now it’s the Monday after, and a lot of AWS advocates in IT and ops departments like yours are afraid of getting thrown under the bus.  Someone in your management is bound to be a frightening combination of confused and furious about this whole debacle, especially if your company suffered another outage. If you’re someone who’s pushed for the cloud, they’re going to have some questions for you and you’re going to need to have some answers. Read the rest of this entry »

Our own CCO and co-founder, J.R. Storment had a great chat with Reuven Cohen on this week’s Digital Nibbles podcast. Learn a litte about cloud costs, why they can be a problem and what Cloudability can do to keep them in line.

Listen to the recording:

If you use AWS Reserved Instances, you know that it can be difficult to keep track of the Reservations you’ve purchased, which regions they are in and when they are expiring.  As a result, many companies are hesitant to buy reserved instances for fear that they won’t utilize them enough to cover the added upfront expense. Read the rest of this entry »

Panos Ipeirotis - Department of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences at New York University

The cloud’s scaleability is one of its greatest selling points. But with scaleability comes variable costs, and whenever you have variable costs, it’s only a matter of time until something runs amok and you end up with a big spike in your spending.

Case in point, one Panos Ipeirotis. Panos is “an Associate Professor and George A. Kellner Faculty Fellow at the Department of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences at Leonard N. Stern School of Business of New York University. He is also the Chief Scientist at Tagasauris, and [serves] as ‘academic-in-residence’ at oDesk Research.” In other words, he knows a little something about computers.

Panos is exactly the kind of person who you would never expect to have a problem keeping his cloud costs under control. Yet, in April of 2012, he got an ominous email from AWS letting him know that there’d been an increase in his usage. In fact, his month’s spend was more than 10x his average … and it was going up and up every hour.

What followed was a fantastic bit of detective work on the part of Mr. Ipeirotis and a great reminder that cloud spike happen to the best of us.

It went down like this: Read the rest of this entry »

The cloud isn’t just for large companies with giant IT departments. In fact, the low cost of entry, scaleability and ease of deployment that come with the cloud can be hugely compelling reasons for small and medium-sized businesses to consider switching.

But switching to the cloud isn’t always an easy process, and small to medium-sized businesses have a specific set of hurdles to overcome before they can successfully migrate to a cloud infrastructure.

After seeing hundreds of smaller companies move to the cloud, we’ve put together five of the most common problems that small to medium-sized businesses will face in moving to the cloud. None of them are insurmountable, but all of them should be considered before planning a migration to the cloud. Read the rest of this entry »