You did not miss it did you?

Our new book Seize the Cloud - a Manager's Guide to Success with Cloud Computing is out there, ready to be used as help and inspiration. Perfect to read this weekend or this summer in a swinging hammock. Want one? Contact me! For more summer reading inspiration go and visit http://www.sogeti.com/publications. Happy reading!

A great club to be in

The Sogeti Azure Privilege Club, a global initiative started with Microsoft, is really the place to be, or rather the club to be in. At least if you are thinking about moving into the Cloud. The clients that participate have commited to improve their business processes and performance through Cloud Computing, enabled by the Microsoft Windows Azure platform.

This new VIP club started with 12 clients that in a short time launches innovative Cloud solutions, backed by ours and Microsoft's business and technology experts. WhatI really like about it is that it has quickly resulted in concrete Clouddeliveries. I love when we help our clients, with top experts - and fast.

The sub-themes of the program is Learn - Innovate - Connect. By being a part of the club member companies also inspires eachother and share experiences and strategies. Win-win-win. A great combo. Feel free to join!

Cloud cracks; break down or support

Last week we all heard about the failure of the Eastern US data center of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS). And now there’s more negative talking about the cloud coming up. The cloud is certainly starting to show its cracks.

But is this a bad thing? Is it a not good thing for the cloud’s image that it wasn’t reacting more so than multiple sites and services, like Reddit and Foursquare, that went down? No, it’s not! For the first time we’ve seen what can happen when the cloud fails. And we can now keep it in mind when creating these services and we’ll know what to do when it happens again.

As this excellent post by Scott Gilbertson on Lessons From a Cloud Failure: It’s Not Amazon, It’s You indicates, cloud users should “design with failure in mind”. A cloud is also software and software can fail. But everybody was on ‘Cloud 9’ with the cloud and only the pessimists were talking about cloud failures. Now they’ve seen what can happen and they can prepare for it. Not only the cloud providers like AWS, but also the owners of those cloud services.

Cloud providers and brokers should have recovery mechanisms in place in case of a disaster. According to Gartner: “Any offering that does not replicate the data and application infrastructure across multiple sites is vulnerable to a total failure.” Cloud providers should have guidelines concerning business continuity planning, detailing how long it will take for services to be fully restored.

Again, according to the research firm Gartner, the cloud market will grow to $102.1 billion next year. Companies will continue to weigh the benefits of the cloud, its massive cost savings and easy scalability, against the relatively small risk and annoyance of outages - risks and annoyances that could also have happened with a failure in their own non-cloud data centers.

The level of cost savings gained from moving to the cloud depends on all kinds of variables. The study by Booz Allen Hamilton The Economics of Cloud Computing in 2009 found that "the benefit-to-cost ratio of a non-virtualized 1,000-server data center could reach 15.4:1 after implementation, and total life cycle cost may be 66% lower than maintaining a traditional data center."

In the AWS case, luckily nothing catastrophic happened; no private data was lost or ‘left on the street’. So everybody can sleep well. However, this failure helps to build the hype around the cloud into a more supported use of its services. The failure doesn’t make cracks in the cloud so it’ll break. But it will make cloud construction better and we will be able to enjoy the benefits even more in the near future.

What I would say is that Amazon, other cloud providers and their cloud customers will learn from this outage, because these savings from cloud are simply too great to dismiss, and they will keep the customers coming.

Apple: Use a test technique/A test of Time!

At the beginning of 2011 the hottest technology topic in the news was the alarm clock bug in Apple’s mobile appliances - iPad, iPhone and iPod. For January 1 and January 2 in this New Year, the Alarm Clock application wasn’t functioning. The same problem happened a few months ago when Daylight Saving Time was set in  October 2010.  The issue is with the ‘repeating alarms’ - a software bug in Apple’s software, iOS.

Courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/helionorio

Changing the time

I would like to help the test manager at Apple with the necessary testing  he/she needs to get executed to find this fault in their other software. Because the bug appears with specific time changes; Daylight Saving, New Year, etc; . it looks like an error in specific Equivalence Classes.

OK, but what is an Equivalence Class? According to TMap NEXT®, it’s “the entire value range of a parameter partitioned into classes, in which the system behaviour is similar (or equivalent)”. Other terms used to refer to the design of test cases based on equivalence classes are ‘equivalence partitioning’ and ‘domain testing’.

Why should I use equivalence classes?

Well, as it happens at these specific time changes, you can set these time changes in a value range of a parameter, a class. Within this class, the behaviour is similar; it generates a bug so the alarm doesn’t go off.

How should they test this?

Apple should be using a test technique called the Data Combination Test (DCoT),  a versatile technique for testing of functionality both at the detail level and at an overall system level. In the embedded world, this technique is also known as the “Classification Tree Method”, was developed by Grochtmann and Grimm.

The fact that domain expertise is usable as a test basis also makes this technique suitable for situations in which specifications are incomplete or out of date, or even unavailable altogether. Time changes!

Test the load of Skype?

The last few days Skype has had trouble getting their users connected to their online phones service. The reason being too many concurrent users. That enormous amount of users gave Skype problems; the Supernodes were offline because of a software bug. Now I can say that they should have tested for this defect, but how do you test for a defect that occurs with about 25 million concurrent (online) users, the typical load for Skype on a regular day?

A load test could have found that defect, but how do you organize such a load? Normal load testing software doesn’t have the  option to go as high as 25 million (!); most will only get to 100,000 virtual users. And even if these tools reach these high volumes, virtual users will be very expensive. So how can these internet services, that have so many users, be load tested?

The cloud can provide an answer. Load testing tools that use the cloud can generate an enormous amount of virtual users to create that load, and cloud-enabled test tools are best to use with these great loads. The cloud will generate the load. With the use of the cloud infrastructure, a more ‘realistic’ load can be generated than the virtual load from complex tools. Some of these cloud-enabled performance test tools only work on the production environment (which may or may not be in a cloud environment), but other tools can perform these load tests on the Development, Test or Acceptance environments.

Use these cloud-enabled performance test tools to generate these enormous loads and find defects that only show up when your systems are most under stress. Thus at the worst moment!

  

Does the Cloud also provide Security?

WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange were very high profile in the news these past weeks. And there are some problems surrounding WikiLeaks, payments and DDoS attacks. For now DDoS attacks cannot be repelled, but maybe WikiLeaks has found an answer.

After the news that PayPal, MasterCard and Visa were not allowing any money transfer to WikiLeaks, this because of a criminal investigation of Assange in Sweden and the unveiling of US Foreign Office diplomatic documents. After these organizations were not allowing any payments to WikiLeaks, they were hit by hackers with DDoS attacks. DDoS stands for a distributed denial-of-service attack on webistes to make them unavailable to its potential users. As a result the sites of MasterCard, Visa and PayPal were unavailable; they went 'down'.

Commonly a DDoS is done by saturating the target machine (the website) with external communications requests. As a result the target cannot respond to the traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. It consumes the target’s resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

WikiLeaks also gets hit a lot with DDoS attacks, but they have thought of an answer to these attacks; they moved their website into Amazon’s EC2 cloud. As only the website itself has been transferred to Amazon, for now the data is hosted in France, the US government cannot make any rights to the data. With this solution WikiLeaks hopes to fend off any attacks on its website. As the cloud is elastic it can absorb the saturation by adding extra services from the cloud. As a result the capacity of the website will not be totally consumed and will keep functioning accordingly. The cloud helps in security by making sure the website has continuity, instead of being a security risk!

A winter Cloud

The last few days the Netherlands have been seized by Father Winter. Global warming at its best? Or just a cold end to 2010?  Fact is that transport systems have had problems with the snow and ice. I myself got stuck in Dublin at the start of this month because of the winter weather. But not only are flights cancelled, public transport comes to a halt and we all get stuck on the freeway for hours, the websites of these transport organizations are unavailable due to heavy traffic. As a result, people are not available to get information about their transport and don’t know what to do.

 

The websites are getting so much traffic from people looking to see if their flight is still going, rebook their cancelled flight, check the times of delayed trains, find out about the traffic jams before they leave, or what roads are closed due to ice and snow. All this information becomes unavailable. But what is the solution to this problem?

The websites are unavailable because they are not prepared for that amount of traffic. They haven’t enough bandwidth and servers available; they are not scaled to cope with this volume of requests. However, if the websites were in a cloud environment, they could have this scalability…. just by adding more services when the available amount of services gets to a critical low.

This would not only help in this winter, but also for airlines during the ash cloud in Western Europe, due to the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. A cloud offers websites the necessary scalability!