Emisonian: Joe Emison's Blog

Virtualization let IT automate the entire life cycle of a server, from ­provisioning and initialization through steady-state and change ­management to termination. But this is only the first step on the path to fully coordinated, automated and managed systems. The ­ultimate goal: ­orchestration, where business needs can be defined and executed ­without human intervention. We’ll examine the essential elements of ­orchestration, focusing on public and private clouds.

Read the full piece at InformationWeek Reports.

The good news about cloud standards: They’re not as necessary as Internet standards were at this same point in the development of the Internet. The bad news? The cloud standard situation is a bit of a mess. We have standards-developing organizations creating cloud standards that aren’t being used, we have vendors creating proprietary APIs that are being adopted as de facto standards without anyone’s permission, and everything that even resembles a standard is more vendor-driven than anything we’ve seen in the past. Whether that will come back to haunt us remains to be seen.

To read more, please visit InformationWeek Reports: Cloud Standards.

Hosting data in the cloud has many advantages, but it usually has the distinct disadvantage of being beholden to a single vendor.  Outages do happen, even with S3 (see July 2008).  Until now, it was a huge pain–and a significant cost–to establish any kind of mirroring between S3 and any another major cloud storage vendor.  This is because you need to compare the file lists at both locations, and then copy whatever files are needed, which means that you need to have a server that is at least partly dedicated to this mirroring task.

However, as I have intimated, mirroring between Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files (“CF”) is now much easier, and very cheap.  Read on for the gory details.

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