BTL podcast: Amazon's dark cloud, Microsoft shuffle and more...

This week on the BTL podcast Larry and I discuss the dark cloud around Amazon's S3 on demand infrastructure. The service suffered an outage for a few hours that brought home the reality of on demand services, whether infrastructure or applications. In addition, salesforce.com suffered some service interruptions this week as did RIM of Blackberry fame. Facebook can be slow at times and Bebo downtime increased ten fold. What does it all mean? Just like on premises infrastructure, stuff happens.

But the expectations for Amazon's infrastructure service for uptime may be unrealistic. Amazon is not enterprise-ready--99.99 (52.6 minutes of downtime annually) or 99.999 (5.26 minutes of downtime annually). At least Amazon has a service level agreement. The SLA states that Amazon will "use commercially reasonable efforts to make Amazon S3 available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage (defined below) of at least 99.9% [8.76 hours of downtime per year] during any monthly billing cycle (the 'Service Commitment'). In the event Amazon S3 does not meet the Service Commitment, you will be eligible to receive a Service Credit as described below."

We also discuss the major management shuffle at Microsoft (Mary Jo Foley has the line up, complete with photos), the latest twist and turns in Microsoft's pursuit of Yahoo and the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies in corporations.

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