Jim Liddle

Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) is a new type of storage designed specifically for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS allows you to create volumes that can be mounted as devices by EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes behave as if they were raw unformatted external hard drives and can be formatted using a file system such as ext3 (Linux) or NTFS (Windows) and mounted on an EC2 instance; files are accessed through the file system . They have user supplied device names and provide a block device interface. For a 20 GB volume, Amazon estimates an annual failure rate for EBS volumes from 1-in-200 to 1-in-1000.  The failure rate increases as the size of the volume increases.  Therefore you either need to keep an up-to-date snapshot on S3, or have a backup of the contents... (more)

Cloud Computing Best Practices

Some of the key things to think about when putting your application on the cloud are discussed below. Cloud computing is relatively new, and best practice is still being established. However we can learn from earlier technologies and concepts such as utility compute, SaaS, outsourcing and even internal enterprise centre management, as well as from experience with vendors such as Amazon a... (more)

Virtualization 101

With Virtualization becoming intertwined with cloud computing it is worth taking a step back and looking once again what virtualization is, and is not. Virtualization and Emulation are often compared, but there are a set of important differences. Emulation provides the functionality of a target processor completely in software. The main advantage being that you can emulate one type of pr... (more)

Come and Join the Cloud Crowd in London on 11th November

We’re hosting an event in the city of London on 11th November which is focused on practical implementations of public, private and hybrid clouds. We have speakers from British American Tobacco and Razorfish discussing implementations of private and hybrid clouds as well as GigaSpaces demoing enhanced VMWARE integration. If you want to learn about real implementations of Cloud Computing th... (more)

What Happens When the Cloud Goes Wrong ?

It is great enthusing about the benefits of Cloud Computing, but what are the consequences when it goes wrong ? Of course, there are different levels of  ’going wrong’. We have often publicised outages from the likes of Amazon and Google, but given the publicised SLA’s of each some down time is expected. However things can get much more serious than this. Microsoft have just suffered a d... (more)