In the press in the last two days has been the reported outage of Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in just one North Virginia data center. This has affected many large website includes FourSquare, Hootsuite, Reddit and Quora. A detailed list can be found at ec2disabled.com.

For these popular websites was this avoidable? Absolutely.

Basic scalability principles if deployed in these systems architecture would have averted the significant downtime regardless of your development stack. While I work primarily in MySQL these principles are not new, nor are they complicated, however they are fundamental concepts in scalability that apply to any technology including the …

Found this video regarding Netflix's migration to Amazon's AWS cloud very informative. Enjoy!

Amazon's AWS team has published a series of whitepapers covering various scenarios for migrating into AWS cloud infrastructure. Links to these whitepapers are provided below for your convenience:

- Migrating applications to the AWS cloud
- Migrating web application
- Migrating batch processing applications
- Migrating backend processing pipelines

Cloud Application Architectures

Cloud Application Architectures. By George Reese, O’Reilly 2009. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site).

This is a great book on how to build apps in the cloud! I was happy to see how much depth it went into. It’s short — 150 pages plus some appendixes — so I was expecting it to be a superficial overview. But it isn’t. It is thorough. And it is also obviously built on his own experience building very specific applications that he uses to run his business — he isn’t preaching about stuff he doesn’t know first-hand. Finally, George Reese is a good writer! It’s impressive. This is how he covers so much ground with so much depth in so few pages, …

Savio Rodrigues has published a post arguing that cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure pose a threat to the monetization of open source by specialist vendors.

Savio makes a good case based on the recent launch of AWS’s Relational Database Service, based on MySQL, and Microsoft’s support for MySQL and Tomcat on Azure:

“When Amazon decided to offer MySQL via Amazon RDS, they did so without purchasing MySQL support from Sun. I’ve confirmed that Microsoft Azure is supporting MySQL on Azure without paying Sun for a MySQL Enterprise subscription.”

Clearly there is a threat to open source vendors from cloud-based services. Meanwhile I have previous …

Cloudera lands funding. SourceForge acquires Ohloh. Novell reports Linux growth. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

Cloudera shows signs of progress
GigaOM reported that Cloudera raised $6m Series B funding from Accel and Greylock and is now looking beyond web applications to wider enterprise adoption of Hadoop. Cloudera also announced its first certification program for Hadoop.

Open source goes mainstream in the UK
There have been signs of change recently with regards to open source adoption in the UK, which has traditionally lagged behind the rest of Europe and the US. CBR Magazine provided an analysis of …

Marco Tabini has a great post discussing the cost of the cloud, and the current state of affairs. He calls for a simpler cloud platform, not just in terms of cost, but ease of use and products and services that adapt to changes in the market. Though the $100/month Mosso offering is mentioned (this site is hosted on Mosso), I would like to point out the recent acquisitions by Rackspace/Mosso that make their cloud offerings even more compelling than AWS for me.

• Slicehost : Rackspace announced the acquisition in late 2008. This allows me to spin up virtual instances or Slicehost’s version of AMI’s called Slices (this was updated due to Ian’s comment below. You cannot migrate an AMI from EC2 to …

UPDATED - I had to update this post after a conversation with RightScale founder and CTO Thorsten von Eicken and for Sun’s Open Cloud announcement, which are both now included below.

There has been some substantial technology and news regarding open source software in cloud computing lately. More proof that open source is reaching into nearly all aspects of enterprise and broader IT, and also reinforcement of the idea that open source software will continue to have a pervasive and disruptive impact on the way organizations of all shapes and sizes do their computing and deal with their data.

First up is RightScale, which as detailed by 451 colleague and Principal Analyst William Fellows, is up and running across the pond on Amazon’s EU EC2. As WiF reports, RightScale started with …