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Amazon and Azure outages show growing pains of "hyper-hyper-scale" public cloud

by Greg Pierce
Chief Cloud Officer, Concerto,
Data center server racks

On Feb. 28, Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) went down after an employee issued the wrong command during a debugging exercise. Among those affected were big names like Netflix, Spotify and Expedia.

Two weeks later on March 16, issues with Microsoft Azure's Cluster frustrated storage customers throughout the Eastern U.S. Their data was inaccessible for hours.

While some were surprised by these well-publicized outages, most experts know that even the largest cloud providers can be vulnerable, and therefore so are their customers. And this is no trivial issue: AWS alone accounts for more than 45 percent of public IaaS market share. Customers likely see this scale as reason to trust that their mission-critical computing resources are subject to minimal downtime risk. But is this trust well-placed given how quickly technology is changing and demand is growing?

AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud and others continue to push the envelope with cloud storage and services. The market has officially moved beyond hyper scale public cloud growth to what I like to call "hyper-hyper-scale" growth. And, more important, vendors are learning to navigate the challenges serving this accelerated growth as they go - a pretty sobering thought.

Cloud services providers are navigating uncharted waters, they are bringing their customers along for the ride. Consider an outage that occurs at unprecedented load levels or because providers are still learning to manage the system ...

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About Greg Pierce

A 20-year technology consultant, Greg Pierce is considered one of the foremost experts on cloud computing trends, systems integration and deployment strategies. Greg develops the strategic direction, vision and product offerings for Concerto and manages sales, service and delivery for all customers.

Greg specializes in helping businesses understand, select and deploy innovative cloud solutions that leverage on-premise, hosted, third party and hybrid models. He was influential in the formation of Concerto Cloud Services and its virtual private cloud infrastructure, and under his leadership, Concerto has become one of the leading cloud services providers in the country, including recognition from Microsoft as the U.S. Independent Software Vendor (ISV) of the Year for Cloud Solutions.

Prior to founding Concerto, Greg held management positions in Tribridge's Cloud, Security and Infrastructure, and Managed Services practices. Before joining Tribridge in 2008, Greg owned and operated two companies that provided a variety of IT managed services and cloud computing solutions for customers throughout the U.S., including platforms for the delivery of ERP and other core business applications via private cloud since 2004. He has also served as a CIO.

Greg is an avid speaker for Fortune 500 enterprises, industry conferences and user groups. He serves on the Advisory Board for the University of South Florida (USF) College of Business, the Advisory Board for USF's Executive MBA Program and on the Executive Advisory Council at the Donald R. Tapia School of Business at Saint Leo University. He is a member of Microsoft's Infrastructure Partners Advisory Council and that organization's Cloud Economics Subcommittee. He holds an MBA from USF and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Eckerd College.

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