The fire sale of the HP TouchPad proved one thing: if it's cheap enough, they will come. This could be good news for Amazon, who reportedly plans to release its own tablet in late September/early October for "hundreds less" than the iPad.
VMware's attempt to recover from an outage in its brand-new cloud computing service inadvertently caused a second outage the next day, the company said.
VMware's new Cloud Foundry service - which is still in beta - suffered downtime over the course of two days last week, not long after the more highly publicized outage that hit Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud.
Cloud Foundry, a platform-as-a-service offering for developers to build and host Web applications, was announced April 12 and suffered "service interruptions" on April 25 and April 26.
The first downtime incident was caused by a power outage in the supply for a storage cabinet. Applications remained online but developers weren't able to perform basic tasks, like logging in or creating new applications. The outage lasted nearly 10 hours and was fixed by the afternoon.
But the next day, VMware officials accidentally caused a second outage while developing an early detection plan to prevent the kind of problem that hit the service the previous day.
VMware official Dekel Tankel explained that the April 25 power outage is "something that can and will happen from time to time," and that VMware has to ensure that its software, monitoring systems and operational practices are robust enough to prevent power outages from taking customer systems offline.
With that in mind, VMware began developing "a full operational playbook for early detection, prevention and restoration" the very next day.
"At 8am [April 26] this effort was kicked off with explicit instructions to develop the playbook with a formal review by our operations and engineering team scheduled for noon," Tankel wrote. "This was to be a paper only, hands off the keyboards exercise until the playbook was reviewed. Unfortunately, at 10:15am PDT, one of the operations engineers developing the playbook touched the keyboard. This resulted in a full outage of the network infrastructure sitting in front of Cloud Foundry. This took out all load balancers, routers, and firewalls; caused a partial outage of portions of our internal DNS infrastructure; and resulted in a complete external loss of connectivity to Cloud Foundry."
The second-day outage was the more serious of the two.
"This was our first total outage, which is an event where we need to put up a maintenance page," Tankel continued. "During this outage, all applications and system components continued to run. However, with the front-end network down, we were the only ones that knew that the system was up. By 11:30 a.m. PDT the front end network was fully operational."
VMware's second-day problem illustrated the element of human error in cloud networks, just as the root-cause analysis of Amazon's cloud outage did. In the case of Amazon, a mistake made during a system upgrade led to trouble that took several days to fully correct. (See also: "Amazon: Bad execution during planned upgrade caused outage")
VMware, which is best known for its server virtualization technology, is a new player in offering a publicly available cloud service. Previously, VMware sold technology to help customers and service providers build their own clouds.
Because Cloud Foundry is so new the customer impact was not as severe as the one caused by Amazon, whose outage forced offline numerous websites that rely on Amazon infrastructure. But VMware is getting a taste of what it's like to be a service provider when things go wrong.
When Amazon.com's outage last week - specifically, the failure of its EBS (elastic block storage) subsystem - left popular websites and services such as Reddit, Foursquare, and Hootsuite crippled or outright disabled, the blogosphere blew up with noise around the risks of using the cloud. Although a few defenders spoke up, most of these instant experts panned the cloud and Amazon.com. The story was huge, covered by the New York Times and the national business press; Amazon.com is now "enjoying" the same limelight that fell on Microsoft in the 1990s. It will be watched carefully for any weakness and rapidly kicked when issues occur.
It's the same situation we've seen since we began to use computers: They are not perfect, and from time to time, hardware and software fails in such a way that outages occur. Most cloud providers, including Amazon.com, have spent a lot of time and money to create advanced multitenant architectures and advanced infrastructures to reduce the number and severity of outages. But to think that all potential problems are eliminated is just being naive.
Some of the blame around the outage has to go to those who made Amazon.com a single point of failure for their organizations. You have to plan and create architectures that can work around the loss of major components to protect your own services, as well as make sure you live up to your own SLA requirements.
Although this incident does indeed show weakness in the Amazon.com cloud, it also highlights liabilities in those who've become overly dependent on Amazon.com. The affected companies need to create solutions that can fail over to a secondary cloud or locally hosted system - or they will again risk a single outage taking down their core moneymaking machines. I suspect the losses around this outage will easily track into the millions of dollars.
Never trust a single system component, be it a cloud, a network, a router, a database, or whatever. Figure out what to do when a component goes offline or fails in other ways. The typical solution is to fail to secondary components that can operate until the primary is back online. That used to be a given in IT. Unfortunately, many organisations have put too much trust into clouds, pushing their systems out to providers with the incorrect thought that a third party will provide the resiliency and the redundancy they require.
As we've seen so dramatically, clouds have limitations, too. Don't get mad at that fact - just deal with it.
Amazon has stopped hosting the WikiLeaks website, according to US Senator Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Independent.
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Could this be spun as a good thing? Sure, if you ask Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr. He argues that variable pricing has overall been a good thing for the company, though he also hedged by suggesting a 30 percent increase during a recession was perhaps not the brightest idea the music industry has ever had.
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Though Amazon and Red Hat provided a few glimmers of sunlight the tech sector suffered through a turbulent week, with no signs of letup soon.