The most recent three-day failure of the Amazon cloud to deliver customer services highlights the importance of understanding what is the meaning of promised levels of service. The Amazon EC2 SLA guarantees 99.95% availability of services within a Region over a trailing 365-day period. A customer then qualifies for SLA Service Credits for the fees [...]

Yesterday Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported an outage of its processing services in the Northern Virginia data centers. Multiple web sites were out of service. This attracted widespread attention from evening TV news reports and from major daily newspapers. The word is out that cloud computing could be unreliable. A review of uptime performance of [...]

For further progress of the development of cloud operations it will be necessary to establish standard that will assure that the cloud environment is interoperable. It is the sense of this blog to describe the formats that will assure a customer that any application, once placed in the cloud environment, will be transportable to any [...]

In the February 2, 2011 blog about IPv6 I concluded that: “ … Despite high-level policy mandates promulgated in 2003 and in 2010 the IPv4 to IPv6 conversions will not happen very soon.” * Various reports agreed that the scarcity of IP addresses was a geographic occurrence. This was caused by insufficient initial allocation of [...]

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is the DoD’s first implementation of cloud computing. DISA has set up the Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE) program as offering IaaS solutions. IaaS is based on self-service provisioning where DISA acts as a broker that arranges access to cloud operators such as Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Terremark and others. * Whether DoD customers [...]