Maximilian Ahrens

Cloud computing is such a fascinating topic because, to anybody who can get enough distance from the marketing hype, it really represents a significant departure from the way the software and the hardware industry have been operating in the last decades. In fact, cloud computing is to the traditional IT industry what the Internet has been to the music and film industry: an unwelcome and very threatening development dictating completely different business models. The basic technical premises behind cloud computing are known since many years. Already in the 80's, as the number of computers around constantly increased, it did not take long until people realized many of them were idle for most of time. The result was the first cluster management tools capable of moving simple jobs between machines. From there, the advances in networking during the 90's brought Grid Com... (more)

Rackspace Outage: Enterprise Clouds Need To Be Build Differently

Rackspace on Monday experienced an outage that completely shut down its hosted sites – apparently due to a problem with its Dallas datacenter. I think you know what’s coming – The Cloud. Yep, a “breathable”, automated Private Cloud dynamically sharing resources across multiple datacenters could significantly mitigate outages like this. Looking at all kinds of public clouds the issue becomes critical. Current providers focus primarily on providing best prices for a specific set of Web 2.0 applications. Now, as the cloud industry is moving towards the enterprise — this sets up comple... (more)