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Cloud Computing Lessons Learned from the Executives

While attending Interop 2010 in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to sit in on a session about Lessons Learned in implementing cloud computing.  The moderator over this discussion was Killian Murphy, who had just started as the Director of Product Management at VMware two days prior to the session.

The executives sitting on the discussion panel were:

Colin Hosert, CIO and CISO, Escape Media Group

Donald Army, Sr Director Network Services PRN

Jim Vitek, eCommerce Director, Dominos Pizza

Jeremy Edberg, Operations Manager, reddit.com

Kowsik Guruswamy, Co-founder and CTO, Mu Dynamics Inc

One take away for me is that we’re really still a long way from standardizing what cloud computing means to every organization, how it is best implemented and utilized, and how we ensure that data is secure in the cloud.

Some interesting factoids from the discussion:

• Small company pluses: low cost, high scalability

• Big company pluses: allows an end around through the red-tape purchase process of servers

• Escape Media Group findings: migration was a big plus using the cloud, extraction was a big plus for the initial migration and for the ongoing ability to move data/files around.  However, they ran into testing issues.  They should have run heavier test traffic throughout because bigger loads once they went live brought the cloud service down.

• Reddit.com findings: had a physical data center through May 2009. Actual migration ended up just being some down time on a Friday night with some tweaks following.  Overall the migration wasn’t too difficult - can depend on your expectation and preparedness going in.  The less you’re expecting things to be just like your data center the easier the migration will be.

• Domino’s Pizza findings: Superbowl Sunday is always difficult - they try to ensure that they have a little more server power than their normal peak.  On Superbowl Sunday the stores are just about as busy as a typical Friday night, but the one central web ordering point is were the stress happened.  They’re working toward attaining a provisional infrastructure to be able to handle the largest loads, but they’re not quite there yet.

• Reddit.com findings:  29% reduction in monthly costs immediately following the move to the cloud.  This has continued for the past year even though traffic has quadrupled.  Agility is much better, they’re ordering fewer machines, and flexibility is huge.

• Problem diagnosis issues:  reddit.com found problem diagnosis to be a big pain.  They have to determine if it’s the cloud’s fault or their own fault.  It’s always been reddit’s fault every time so far even though they assumed it was Amazon’s fault (their cloud provider).  Escape Media Group stated the same problem resolution issues.