Partly Cloudy

This week, some public documents came to light that I thought I would not see for a few years yet, which plainly show that I’m a repeat offender. Yes, it’s true: I’ve formed another startup.

The particulars of the company and its business plan I’ll share over time; suffice it to say it lies in the intersection between social media and insight as a service, and it’s a project I’m very excited about.

One of the early jobs, of course, is rounding out the initial team and I’m talking to some wonderful folks in the fields of UX, marketing, and technology. If you know someone I should meet, please drop me a line.

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A recent study commissioned by IBM showed that 60% of CIOs are ready to move to cloud computing. That means a lot of applications which were never designed for use in the cloud are going to be moving there over the next few years.

For those who are putting an application in the cloud for the first time and wondered, perhaps, what challenges they will face, have a look at the short overview I just put together for LinkedSeattle.com.

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On April 21, starting at about 1:40 in the morning, Amazon Web Services had their worst outage ever, putting customers large and small out of commission for days. As of this writing, services are nearly restored, but some work remains.

Not only was it a disappointing misstep for Amazon, but cloud computing as a whole took some lumps, with some even asking if the cloud computing hysteria was officially over.

The list of affected companies reads like a who’s who: Quora, Reddit, Netflix, Eli Lilly, Heroku, Zynga and possibly hundreds of others, especially Silicon Valley startups.

And yet, Amazon’s stock ended the week at $185.89, over $7 higher than it stood at the end of the week prior. Why?

Because, perversely, the outage at Amazon served as a reminder of what a cloud computing powerhouse they’ve become. And it happened on top of a slew of articles like this one in the Wall Street Journal, touting the Gartner and Forrester projections for Cloud Computing’s growth.

Amazon had a difficult week, and attention immediately focused on their legendarily secretive culture. At the same time, the far-reaching nature of the outage has only underscored the magnitude of their leadership in cloud computing. And the stock price shows it.

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