The third and final episode in the Savvy Granny Cloud Channel has now been released.  If you haven’t watched any of them so far take a look as they are quite amusing.  Now at this point I must disclose that I currently work for the company behind them and was promised by our head of marketing that she’d make me a cup of tea if I did – not that I’m easily bribed you understand. 

Anyway, I hope you enjoy and have a chuckle at the geek humour…

IT solutions provider, ioko and Sun Microsystems have come up with an entertaining way of getting their ‘Cloud’ messaging across to the masses.

The first of three videos has been released starring Savvy Grannies Vera and Ethel who casually discuss their way through much of the confusion and complexities around ‘The Cloud’.

The next video will be released shortly… watch this space..

Here’s an interesting article based around the findings of Sydney based researchers.  The findings confirm what many of us already suspected, or knew, that may of the “cloud” offerings out there don’t always hold up well to enterprise level loads (yet).

The research is based around seven months of stress testing against the following three commercial cloud services:

- Amazon’s EC2
- Google’s AppEngine
- Microsoft’s Azure

The findings did highlight that particular cloud services were “suited to particular applications”.

If you are following the development of “the cloud” or have already adopted some of its services then you will find this an interesting read. The article can be found here.

Wow, it’s been a couple of crazy weeks where I seem to have had no time to spend writing articles for TechHead.  I’m hoping that this will now change so more regular articles should start appearing on the site.

As always I am open to suggestions for articles, ideas, format, etc – so drop me a line…

Anyway… I thought I’d draw to your attention that the next London Cloud Camp is on the 9th July and is hosted at the Microsoft building in Victoria, London.  So if you’re local (or even if you’re not local) then register for this evening event here and head on down.  For those of you that haven’t attended a Cloud Camp before I recommend coming along as it offers a number of quick fire type sessions that offer valuable insight into things Cloud (ideas, products,  trends, etc) that are evolving in this space.    
* Please Note: This picture has nothing to do with this blog posting what so ever I just thought it looked a little bland and needed something funny.  And hey, who doesn’t like a bit of Star Wars humour !

I’ve been along to the last 2 Cloud Camps with vinf.net and I have signed up to attend this next one.  If you plan on heading along come and say ‘Hi !’ as it’s always nice to meet new people (especially those that read TechHead) 

More details can be found here:

London Cloud Camp – 9th July 2009

It would appear that Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) platform has been experiencing a few difficulties the past half day.  According to the CloudStatus.com Amazon Service status monitoring service it is showing as having a ‘Service Failure’ between 22:56 yesterday (22/3/09) and  15:58 today (23/3/09).  If your wondering how Hyperic, who run CloudStatus, monitor Amazon’s S3 platform here is an outline.

I find it hard to believe that there was a total service failure during this time and suspect that perhaps it was only part of the S3 environment though if the CloudStatus’s monitor is to be believed then there was definitely something untoward happening.

With an increasing  number of servers running on Amazon’s EC2 ‘Elastic’ platform using the S3 service for  storage does this highlight to businesses thinking of building out on ‘The Cloud’ that occasionally there will be Cloudless days..  (Sorry, couldn’t resist it ).

Amazon Web Services (AWS) can be monitored via the independent CloudStatus site or directly at Amazon’s own AWS status update page.

Just a reminder to those of you based in the UK that the London Cloud Camp is taking place this evening (Thursday 12th March).  I attended the last event and found it most worthwhile.  They run in the evenings after work so there are worries about getting time off to attend.  Here is a break down of the agenda and lightening talk speakers/topics. 

Agenda
18h15 Registration
19h00 Lightning Talks – prompt start please!
20h00 Unconference Discussions
21h00 Networking – Beer and Pizza
22h00 Close

Lightning Talks
Confirmed speakers:

1. Owen Garrett, Product Manager, Zeus Technology, “Load balancing in the Cloud”
2. Joe Baguley, CTO EMEA, Quest, title TBD
3. Richard Davies, CEO, ElasticHosts, “How cloud will change your company”
4. Solomon Hykes, dotCloud, “Introducing a cross-cloud platform”
5. William Fellows, Principal Analyst, The 451 Group, “The Sky’s The Limit”
6. Alex Heneveld, CTO Cloudsoft Corporation, “Cloud Routemaster”
7. Mark Masterson, enterprise architect and troublemaker, “Security? Why what you probably think that means is probably doomed to fail, in the cloud…”
8. Matthew Fowler, Director NT/e, “CloudSave – Object-Relational Mapping for the Cloud”
9. Philipp Huber, Huber & Associates, “What to consider when building an Enterprise Cloud”
10. Neil Bartlett, Author of ‘OSGi in Practice’, “Provisioning the Cloud with OSGi”
11. Clare Coull, Marketing Manager of Quest Software UK & Ireland Ltd, “Just Another Architecture?”

More information on Cloud Camp and this particular London based event can be found here.

For those of you not based in London there are other regular Cloud Camp events happening around the UK and rest of the world check out the main Cloud Camp site here for more details.