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As everything moves to the cloud, the underlying network can make or break your apps.

To address the need for network visibility, Boundary, a developer of real-time network monitoring-as-a-service, today announced a $4 million Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Boundary, which is focused on providing continuous visibility into network and application traffic flows in public cloud environments, was founded by Ben Black, previously part of Amazon.com's infrastructure team, and Cliff Moon, who was part of Powerset (acquired by Microsoft).

In terms of business models, this is clearly a case where cloud computing has helped … Read more

European regulators have begun scrutinizing whether Samsung was fair in matters concerning the overlap of standards and patents, the latest development in a global legal battle with Apple over smartphone technology.

Lawsuit watcher Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents spotted the move in an Apple court filing. The Apple filing said, "Samsung's litigation campaign and other conduct related to its declared-essential patents is so egregious that the European Commission recently has opened an investigation to determine whether Samsung's behavior violates EU competition laws."

And the EC confirmed the move in a statement to CNET: "The Commission … Read more

EnterpriseDB, a provider of enterprise-class products and services based on PostgreSQL, today announced Postgres Plus Cloud Server, which the company has billed as "a full-featured, Oracle-compatible, enterprise-class PostgreSQL database-as-a-service for public and private clouds with support for Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus, Rackspace, and GoGrid."

We've seen other database-as-a-service offerings come on the scene from the likes of Salesforce.com's Database.com, Amazon RDS, as well as from startup Xeround. But they're not based on PostgreSQL, which has had years of hardening and development by a committed community. The other databases are not "Oracle compatible," … Read more

Amazon Web Services' cloud-computing infrastructure experienced a brief network outage this evening that knocked offline popular sites such as Netflix, Quora, Reddit, and Foursquare.

The network connectivity issues struck Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) at Amazon's northern Virginia site, which handles AWS operations for the U.S. East Coast at 7:39 p.m. PDT and were resolved about 25 minutes later, according to the Amazon Web Services Health Dashboard.

AWS is a flagship example of one facet of cloud computing, a flexible collection of online computing services that can ramp up and down according to varying needs, … Read more

Calling it "excessive," Microsoft criticized in an appeals hearing today the 899 million euro fine imposed three years ago by European Union antitrust regulators, according to Reuters.

The fine, equivalent to $1.35 billion in 2008 and $1.27 billion today, penalized Microsoft for failing to comply with sanctions in a case involving the information it provides to other companies to allow their products to work with Microsoft software. The fine specifically addresses the rates that Microsoft charges to license its interoperability protocols and patents to third parties.

At the time, the fine was the largest ever imposed … Read more

There's no doubt that the recent "partial failure" of the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform is giving enterprises, service providers, and developers pause--and will continue to do so for months to come. Amazon called the outage "partial" and a "degradation," but it was a very big deal. A significant part of Amazon's flagship EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) was offline for a day, as were the related EBS (Elastic Block Store) and RDS (Relational Database Service) offerings. The failure affected only the northern Virginia data center ("US-East"), and the majority … Read more

Today, April 29, 2011, Amazon Web Services released a "summary" of its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and RDS (Relational Database Service) disruption in its U.S. East Region. This came approximately one week after what appears to be a classic example of a rolling disaster that occurred after someone incorrectly executed a communications network traffic shift as part of "normal AWS scaling activities." I read human error here--long known as the leading cause of large system failures.

The rolling disaster is a well understood phenomenon in IT and can be hard to foresee with a complex system. The way to discover and fix potential failure points is to test on a regular basis then build around them. But periodic testing can become difficult for a system of this magnitude.

What I find positive about the Amazon summary is a set of disaster recovery recommendations for users and an admission that AWS customer support during the outage was less than stellar. The disaster recovery recommendations should now be required reading for every AWS customer. In fact, I think that all cloud services users should read this statement with an eye to discovering potential holes in their own disaster recovery strategies. … Read more

A serious Amazon Web Services outage has extended well into its second day, but Amazon said Friday the end is in sight for most affected customers of the cloud-computing infrastructure.

"We continue to see progress in recovering volumes, and have heard many additional customers confirm that they're recovering. Our current estimate is that the majority of volumes will be recovered over the next 5 to 6 hours," Amazon said on its AWS status dashboard at 8:49 a.m. today. Volumes are areas of Amazon's Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service that store data.

But for some … Read more

A partial failure at Amazon Web Services' cloud-computing infrastructure brought down some Internet operations today, including the Web sites of Quora and Reddit.

The outage struck the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service at Amazon's northern Virginia site, which handles AWS operations for the U.S. East Coast. The problems began at 1:41 a.m. PT, according to Amazon's AWS status dashboard, with delays and errors when connecting to servers over a network.

A long list of customers has come to rely on Amazon EC2, which provides servers on a pay-as-you-go basis that lets customers ramp or down … Read more