Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS)’ S3 (simple storage service) suffered an extended period of service disruption knocking a multitude of sites and businesses offline – and the fault was all down to good old fashioned human error, according to the company.

According to a note published to customers, the fault occurred during a debugging session. “At 9:37AM PST, an authorised S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process,” the note reads. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.”

As a result, this greater-than-expected removal prompted a full restart for US-EAST-1 region, which also meant that other AWS services, such as new instance launches of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Block Store (EBS), and Lambda, were also affected.

The resulting casualty list was vast, including Quora, Slack, and Medium. Some users reported that their Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled services, such as connected lightbulbs and thermostats, had gone blank because they were connected to the Amazon backend, while AWS itself could not change its status dashboard, meaning green lights were erroneously blinking away while the chaos unfolded.

AWS, as one would expect in such a situation, said it would make several changes to ensure the issue does not happen again. The first step, which has already been carried out, was to change its capacity tool to create a slower process, as well as adding safeguards to prevent capacity being removed when it goes past the minimum required level. The company has also said it will change the admin console of its status dashboard to run across multiple regions and have less of a dependence on S3, adding that while the AWS Twitter feed tried to keep users updated, it understood the dashboard provided ‘important visibility’ to customers.

So what happens from here? Naturally, the resultant conversation and best practice was to not put ‘all your eggs in one cloud’, as Chuck Dubuque, VP of product and solution marketing at Tintri put it. “This is a wakeup call for those hosted on AWS and other providers to take a deeper look at how their infrastructure is set up and emphasises the need for redundancy,” said Shawn Moore, CTO at Solodev. “If nothing else, the S3 outages will cause some businesses to reconsider a diversified environment – that includes enterprise cloud – to reduce their risks,” Dubuque added.

“We want to apologise for the impact this event caused for our customers,” AWS added. “While we are proud of our long track record of availability with Amazon S3, we know how critical this service is to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses.

“We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to improve our availability even further.”

You can read the full statement here.

The modern software development landscape consists of best practices and tools that allow teams to deliver software in a near-continuous manner. By adopting a culture of automation, measurement and sharing, the time to ship code has been greatly reduced, allowing for shorter release cycles and quicker feedback from customers and users. Still, with all of these tools and methods, how can teams stay on top of what is taking place across their infrastructure and codebase? Hopping between services and command line interfaces creates context-switching that slows productivity, efficiency, and may lead to early burnout.

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ChatOps is an emerging topic that has led to the wide availability of integrations between group chat and various other tools/platforms. Currently, HipChat is an extremely powerful collaboration platform due to the various ChatOps integrations that are available. However, DevOps automation can involve orchestration and complex workflows. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Himanshu Chhetri, CTO at Addteq, will cover practical examples and use cases such as self-provisioning infrastructure/applications, self-remediation workflows, integrating monitoring and complimenting integrations between Atlassian tools and other top tools in the industry.

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Artificial Intelligence has become a topic of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo at the Javits Center in New York, June 6-8, will find fresh new content in a new track called Cognitive Computing | Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning. Cloud Expo is still accepting submissions for this new track, so please visit www.cloudcomputingexpo.com for the latest information.
20th Cloud Expo, taking place June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday’s debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy.

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«My role is working with customers, helping them go through this digital transformation. I spend a lot of time talking to banks, big industries, manufacturers working through how they are integrating and transforming their IT platforms and moving them forward,» explained William Morrish, General Manager Product Sales at Interoute, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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Technology innovation is the driving force behind modern business and enterprises must respond by increasing the speed and efficiency of software delivery. The challenge is that existing enterprise applications are expensive to develop and difficult to modernize. This often results in what Gartner calls «Bimodal IT,» where business struggle to apply modern tools and practices to traditional monolithic applications. But these existing assets can be modernized and made more efficient without having to be completely overhauled. By leveraging methodologies like DevOps and agile, alongside emerging technologies like cloud-native services and containerization, traditional applications and teams can be more easily modernized without risking everything that depends on them. This session will describe how to apply lessons learned from modern app development, including the starting point to modernization that many enterprises are using to quickly improve speed, efficiency, and software quality.

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Traditional IT, great for stable systems of record, is struggling to cope with newer, agile systems of engagement requirements coming straight from the business. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, William Morrish, General Manager of Product Sales at Interoute, outlined ways of exploiting new architectures to enable both systems and building them to support your existing platforms, with an eye for the future. Technologies such as Docker and the hyper-convergence of computing, networking and storage creates a platform for consolidation, migration and enabling digital transformation.

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After yet another cloud outage yesterday (see AWS’s S3 outage was so bad Amazon couldn’t get into its own dashboard to warn the world) the world (or at least its North American part) once again went crazy how dangerous the cloud is and how you should go build your own data center because you know […]

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Opinion As digital transformation continues to dominate the IT landscape, cloud computing has helped a wealth of organisations to evolve. So true is the fact that Gartner predicts that by 2020, a corporate “no-cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no-internet” policy is today. The CIO of 2017 undoubtedly needs to embrace the cloud, but the transition is still a sizeable task without adequate help and guidance.

Managed service providers have been around for a while and can provide any manner of services – virtual desktops, security, storage – you name it and there is a company out there who will provide it ‘as a service’. Enter managed cloud providers – the new breed of MSP – with expertise in everything cloud.

But what exactly should a CIO look for in a managed cloud provider? What responsibilities remain at the executive level or with the internal IT team? Should the CIO be looking for a ‘trusted advisor’ or an ‘outsourced partner CIO’?

The changing role of the CIO

These questions can only be answered by first looking at the role of the CIO and how this – alongside, but also independently of IT – is changing. The role of the traditional CIO was technical oversight of day-to-day IT operations. The CIO was a seasoned IT pro with the desire to step away from his desk overwhelmed with computer screens and walk into a position that controlled IT spending. 

But who does the CIO turn to for expertise and guidance? Finding trusted partners has always been a great option for IT teams looking to expand on the knowledge and capabilities they have in-house. With experts now owning the title of ‘managed cloud providers’ it is a game changer for a CIO looking for a cloud strategy.

Holding up their side of the bargain

When entering into an outsourced partnership there are expectations on both sides. If a managed cloud provider is entrusted with propelling a company into the era of cloud, harnessing a company’s dependency on data to find a competitive advantage and being a trusted partner to the CIO then they have to bring something a bit special to the table.

A truly great managed cloud provider looks at the situation from every level –  they are a trusted ‘outsourced CIO’ who can provide guidance about strategy and part of the IT team who can roll up its sleeves and get into the weeds of combining the existing IT infrastructure with the innovative benefits of the cloud. But this is always easier said than done.

Meeting C-level expectations 

A managed cloud provider’s job is to juggle balls, anticipate needs, provide guidance and be one step ahead of any issues that might arise – to be an extra set of eyes and ears for the CIO.

It may seem basic, but if a managed cloud provider cannot deliver constant availability and isn’t always on the lookout for things that could cause an outage, then the rest is all pointless. Availability is an managed cloud provider’s bread and butter providing the performance a CIO expects and depends on.

As important as availability is, sometimes it’s not enough. In a world always demanding faster and better, performance must be a priority. Always honing in on performance bottlenecks and how to resolve them should be an everyday thing for a managed cloud provider. This is especially true when AWS-like cloud instances can be set up instantaneously and over-used resources and auto-scaling can get out of control.

Compliance – although not a factor for every company or industry – should still be part of a managed cloud provider’s repertoire. Regulations, including the US-EU Privacy Shield and GDPR, mean storing data can be complex and that not all data at a company can be stored in the cloud. As a managed cloud provider, deep knowledge and understanding of any regulation that could impact a customer is vital. As a CIO, the responsibility to comply with all regulations can be daunting, but if a managed cloud provider can provide insight, guidance and most importantly compliance, it can make a huge difference.

Compliance goes hand in hand with security. As public cloud begins to play a larger part in IT strategy, CIO’s can often feel like the control of security is slipping away. A seasoned managed cloud provider has security experts on hand to continuously protect against the latest iteration of attacks and provide proactive security policies.

In the face of all these fundamentals, managed cloud providers have to bring opportunities, innovation and creativity to their work. As workloads expand and change how are those handled differently? What strategic choices can be made around the combination of public, private and hybrid cloud?

And if any of this goes wrong – which is hopefully something you don’t experience as a CIO, but let’s pretend – a great managed cloud provider will have noticed and be on the phone before the customer has realised anything is wrong. An action plan must be in place, issues must be escalated in an efficient manner and solutions, or at least personnel working on a solution, must be available to jump. This is the service portion of a managed cloud provider, but in the eyes of a CIO it can be the critical safety net to the cloud.

It is all about trust

As individual areas, these are all important, but the biggest thing a CIO should expect from their managed cloud provider is trust. There is always a risk in handing over the keys to the IT castle, but through a built-up track record and thoughtful guidance, a managed cloud provider should instil confidence in any CIO and be a trusted partner no matter the journey a company is taking through digital transformation and into the cloud.