Know what cloud services that you use...

This is a good article in understanding which cloud services that one should and one shouldn't. If not understood carefully, cloud adoption can lead into a serious vendor lock-in for life. The low costs of storage encourage data proliferation, and again causes vendor lock-in. 

Be careful in which cloud services you consume.

http://gigaom.com/2013/02/26/fear-of-lock-in-dampens-cloud-adoption/

...

“When you move to cloud, you should be increasing your choices, not decreasing them. You don’t buy three on-premises apps but you can use three services from three vendors in the cloud,” said Robert Jenkins, co-founder and CTO of Cloud Sigma, the Zurich-based cloud provider.

...

It’s fairly straightforward to move things off a bare-bones infrastructure as a platform. But not so easy when higher-end services get layered atop the platform. Even Amazon fans worry that the edition of Amazon’s Simple Workflow Service and other add ons create barriers to exit.

Azure outage due to Expired SSL certificate

In less than 2 days of coming out with good performance numbers on object storage, Azure had an outage due to an expired SSL certificate. I remember of a very similar problem for their microsoft.com domain with expired DNS registration in the year 2000 (or 2001) during the Christmas holiday time. Looks like silly housekeeping items are causing business issues.

Microsoft's failure to renew the security certificate apparently caused the Azure service to go down shortly before 4 p.m. EST Friday. The breakdown prevented Azure customers from accessing files kept in Microsoft's data centers.

Microsoft Azure overtakes Amazon's cloud in performance test

Azure's cloud is faster at uploading and downloading files to the cloud, Amazon still more scalable, storage provider Nasuni finds... Nasuni uses public cloud resources in its enterprise storage offering, so each year the company conducts a series of rigorous tests on the top CSPs' clouds in an effort to see which companies offer the best performing, most reliable infrastructure. Last year, Amazon Web Services' cloud came out on top, but this year Microsoft Azure outperformed AWS in performance and reliability measures. AWS is still better at handling extra-large storage volumes, while Nasuni found that the two OpenStack powered clouds it tested -- from HP and Rackspace -- were lacking, particularly at larger scales. 

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/021913-azure-aws-266831.html?hpg1=bn 

Reid Hoffman's 10 Rules for Entrepreneurial Success

I liked these top 10 mandates for entrepreneurs from the co-founder and angel investor Reid Hoffman:

At last week's the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, Hoffman offered what he calls his "Ten Rules on Entrepreneurship." And if anyone is qualified to come up with such a list, it's this web-savvy wizard who was a founding board member and executive vice president of PayPal and now serves as a partner at venture capital powerhouse Greylock Partners.

1. Be disruptive. Ask yourself: "Is this massive and different? It's got to be ten-times different. It's got to be something that changes an industry." Hoffman uses Skype as an example, calling it a disruptive company because, "it removes these very expensive cross barrier phone charges."
2. Aim big. You'll probably wind up plowing the same amount of time into a small business as you will a big one. So, don't be intimidated by your own big ideas, as there are multiple ways of realizing them.
3. Grow your network. Your network includes investors, advisers, employees and customers. With a broad network, you have the ability to make important, global-sized changes.
4. Plan for better or worse. Part of planning is that you might come across something you weren't expecting and you pivot. And if something doesn't work, you must ask yourself: "What is my Plan B?"
5. Maintain flexible persistence. On one hand, the goal is to have a vision and be persistent. On the other hand, flexibility and being able to change based on what your customers want is paramount. "The art is knowing when to be persistent and when to be flexible and how to blend them."
6. Launch early. "Unless you're Steve Jobs, you're most likely partially wrong about what your theory was." So launch early and often. Launching early attracts customer engagement, and it's the customer who's going to tell you what's wrong so you can correct it.
7. Seek honesty. You need friends who will tell you that you have an ugly baby. Keep your aspirations high, but don't drink your own Kool-Aid -- all the while leveraging the advice of your friends.
8. Be everywhere. It's important to have a great idea for a product, but it's downright vital to have a wide distribution of it. "You can have a kickass product, but if it doesn't get to millions of people, it's irrelevant."
9. Culture is key. You must get hiring right the first time. While experience is impressive, you'll need people who can adapt and thrive amid volatility -- especially in the beginning.
10. Break these rules. The rules of entrepreneurship are not laws of nature. You can break them. What's more, don't listen to all of the rules all of the time.
 

Software license management in the cloud is a mess

Here is a very beautiful and apt article written on software licensing in cloud.

http://info.cloudboltsoftware.com/blog/bid/212556/Cloud-Management-Vendor-Impact-of-Software-Licensing-For-the-Cloud

What’s really odd is that those large vendors also claim to know about cloud. My resulting questions to you are simple:

• Are you relying on cloud strategy from a company that actively uses their software licensing to discourage or prevent you from moving to a more open cloud-centric IT model?
•  Are they leveraging their licenses to force you down the path they want you to?

My subtext:  If you’re listening to intently to those large vendors, the answer to both is “yes”.  Proceed with caution if your primary cloud strategy comes from your hardware, middleware, database, or even OS vendor.

...

Many large vendors (it won’t be hard to find which ones I’m talking about here) take specific steps to limit BYSOL (just to name a few I came across):

• Require specific understanding of underlying hardware architectures or processor specifications
• Require licensing based on the physical, not virtual host
• Mandate customers run vendor-provided license tracking, further complicating multi-location or multi-environment installations
• Prohibit software from being virtualized
• Force purchase of higher-cost public cloud resources which rope in the underlying OS license regardless of customer license availability
• Force purchase of “License Mobility” options in order to run software in public clouds