Page 168 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

Health Dashboard. Amazon regularly reports on the status of
its services through the dashboard. It uses a little green icon
to indicate that a service is functioning normally or a yellow
one to indicate a problem. Normally, the dashboard is littered
with rows of continuous green symbols.
On December 9, at 4:08 a.m. Eastern time, Amazon posted

a warning symbol with information that indicated, “We are in-
vestigating connectivity issues for instances in the US-East-1 re-
gion.” Such information is frustratingly nonspecific to the
cloud user. But there was more. Eighteen minutes later came
the notice, “We are experiencing power issues ...inasingle
availability zone in the US-East-1 region.” What had hap-
pened, according to subsequent notices, was that a primary

power supply component had failed. “Prior to completing the
repair of this unit, a second component, used to assure redun-
dant power paths, failed as well, resulting in a portion of the
servers in that availability zone losing power,” Amazon Web
Services posted to its dashboard.
These notices give the EC2 cloud a degree of transparency,
a prized attribute in cloud operations, but if an individual cus-
tomer depended on them alone, his view into his virtual ma-
chines would be far from transparent—somewhere between

translucent and opaque.
In fact, the user needs to maintain some independent view
into cloud operations to know whether her virtual machines
are running or stalled. As it turns out, a new service, Apparent
Networks’ PathViewCloud, had been in operation for about a
month, and it tracked the service outage to a router on the

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