Who needs monitoring when you have Valleywag & TechCrunch?

It looks like Google Apps suffered a brief outage this morning. How did we find out? Well, from Valleywag of course. After all, the best place to get the status of key cloud based applications and infrastructure is also the same place where you can find out the latest gossip about the valley. Seems natural, right? No thanks.

More proof that for all the benefits the cloud offers, it’s still just one lousy powerstrip/drunk ops guy/evil hax0r away from being just a 500 error page with an old logo on it. Good thing we’re working on adding Google’s cloud services to CloudStatus.com! Stay tuned…

Add comment July 8th, 2008 javier

Obscured by clouds - Google edition

(Obligatory Pink Floyd reference included)

This afternoon we get another data point showing that despite the exciting promise of cloud computing, the realities of managing large scale infrastructure insist on rearing their ugly heads. TechCrunch is reporting that Google Apps had an outage today which caused the service to be completely down.

There’s two serious problems with this outage:

1- The reports of service outages arrive long after anyone who depends on the services can possibly do anything to mitigate their effect.

2- The services themselves seem incapable of providing any visibility into the circumstances that might lead to future outages.

3 comments June 17th, 2008 javier

Google for SysAdmins

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately talking to the management team here at Hyperic about the subject of search. Specifically, Google search since its what most of our users tend to find us with. (No disrespect to our good friends at Ask.com whose search engine seems to be less popular with the sysadmin crowd).

Perhaps the greatest irony of working in the management software business is the fact that the problems our products solve are the same ones that keep people from finding us. After all, who has time to look for new software when you’re busy fighting fires, right?

Add comment May 5th, 2008 javier

Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting

This phrase was used close to a dozen times by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com at his recent keynote at the MySQL conference. Werner used it to describe the day to day tasks of most web operations teams… tasks like racking boxes, configuring routers, and installing software. He mentioned ops teams at Amazon got to spending 70% of their time in this mode, and this was one of the main catalysts for developing infrastructure that brings us S3, SQS, EC2, and more.

4 comments April 21st, 2008 javier

The Open Source Free Lunch

Yesterday I had the opportunity to listen to Marten Mickos deliver the opening keynote at the MySQL conference here in Santa Clara. As usual, Marten does an enviable job at delivering a presentation which talks about MySQL’s business, its new relationship with Sun Microsystems, and what this all has to do with Open Source.

I’ve been lucky to hear Marten speak at a number of events, and have found that one of the most consistent themes can be distilled down to this (which we at Hyperic fully subscribe to):

Build a great product, Empower your Users, Build a great business

1 comment April 16th, 2008 javier

Ringside seats for Enterprise 2.0

What do Hi5, Facebook, or MySpace have to do with enterprise computing? I’ve been asking myself this question for over a year, as I have continued to hear about social networking’s imminent impact on business applications. Frankly, my answer up until recently was “not a whole lot”. It seemed all too convenient for the technology industry to try to rationalize a consumer trend (social networking) into an established space (enterprise apps) and even add it’s own “Next-Big-Thing”(tm) moniker (Enterprise 2.0).

Add comment March 24th, 2008 javier

Clouds are no substitute for competence

This morning I came across an AP article on Yahoo news calling out Amazon’s ‘cloud computing’ initiatives. The all-too-clever title “Amazon’s Hot New Item: its data center” caught my attention and I wanted to see the folks at AP take a crack at the topic.

The article seemed innocent enough until I ran into this quote from the CEO of Dallas-based startup Mile Meter:

During the first dot-com boom, he said, “It was a badge of strength to have as much as possible in house. “Now, unless that is your core business…it’s a liability.”

5 comments February 2nd, 2008 javier

All in the family

News hit today that Covalent Technologies (or what I commonly refer to as Covalent 2.0) was acquired by SpringSource. This is an incredibly interesting piece of news since as most of you might have heard, Hyperic’s founding team met while working at the original Covalent (1.0). We also developed the first version of the HQ technology (then called Covalent Application Manager) back in 2002.

1 comment January 29th, 2008 javier

A tale of two deals

What an incredible start to an otherwise unremarkable, mid-January day!

First, the huge news about MySQL being acquired by Sun Microsystems… then the news about BEA being acquired by Oracle. The first deal is significant given the ‘imminent’ IPO that was expected by MySQL later this year. The second is significant if only because of the amount of bickering between BEA’s management team, Oracle, and their respective shareholders.

Add comment January 16th, 2008 javier

More proof that people dont understand OSS licensing

It is incredible to me that despite all the publicity and sexiness of open source, the majority of people still dont understand how open source licenses work. Despite the good work of most folks in attempting to explain the key differences between Apache/BSD-style licenses, GPL licenses, and others, I get the impression that a lot of developers out there treat open source as some sort of no-strings-attached code resource. Want to use GPL library in your code? Easy… abide by the license, or find another alternative.

2 comments November 28th, 2007 javier