How SmugMug survived the Amazon Outage

SmugMug, a photo-sharing site, says four simple things allowed it to survive the recent Amazon Web Services outage, despite its reliance on Amazon and cloud computing infrastructure. Geographical dispersion is the first principle. SmugMug uses "multiple Availability Zones." When there is a problem at one of the three centers, service continues from the other sites. The company also "designed for failure," assuming there would be a major outage at some point, requiring backup systems and components.

SmugMug does not use "Elastic Block Storage," which failed during the recent outage. SmugMug also does not rely completely on cloud computing. "The exact types of data that would have potentially been disabled by the EBS meltdown don’t actually live at AWS at all; it all still lives in our own datacenters," says company CEO Don MacAskill.

The advice is obvious. When using cloud computing facilities, an organization requires the same level of redundancy as when using facilities on the premises, or in an owned data center.

How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse

Email Remains a Top Mobile Activity

While just over a quarter (28 percent) of non-smartphone users said they check their email "constantly" throughout the day, nearly half (45 percent) of smartphone users do so, according to ExactTarget.

In fact, checking email is a more common mobile web activity than visiting Facebook (23 percent) or Twitter (five percent) among smartphone users.

Overall, the home PC remains the top location from which consumers constantly check email (24 percent) with 63 percent using it to check email daily. Meanwhile, 16 percent of email users overall constantly check email from a work or school computer (22 percent daily).

Eleven percent of email users check constantly from a mobile phone (15 percent daily) but the numbers are minimal for iPad/tablet users with two percent constantly checking and three percent checking daily.

The Audience Has Spoken - Social Media Marketing Stats and Research

Google Gets into Social Shopping

Google gets into the social shopping space with Groupon and LivingSocial.

Half of U.S. Adults Shop Using Mobiles

Netflix Supplemental Now, But "All Will Change"

Liberty Media clearly sees Netflix as a supplemental channel to cable TV, satellite and telco TV distributors, but doesn't think that always will be the case. "Cable players pay us $1 billion and more a year," says Liberty Chief Executive Greg Maffei. Netflix is not in that league as a revenue generator.

"When you look at Netflix, the customers come in two categories," says Maffei. "It’s either the consumer who would never be a premium subscriber or cable subscriber at all."

"The second kind of consumer is the price-sensitive viewers who have cable but like the ease of over-the-top options at the right price," says Maffei.

But "all of this will change," Maffei notes.

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"Designing for Failure"

The recent outages for some Amazon Web Services customers illustrates the "design for failure" model of cloud computing, some argue. Under the "design for failure" model, combinations of software and management tools take responsibility for application availability. The actual infrastructure availability is entirely irrelevant to your application availability and 100-percent uptime should be achievable even when a cloud provider has a massive, data-center-wide outage.

Most cloud providers follow some variant of the "design for failure" model. A handful of providers, however, follow the traditional model in which the underlying infrastructure takes ultimate responsibility for availability. It doesn't matter how dumb your application is, the infrastructure will provide the redundancy necessary to keep it running in the face of failure. The clouds that tend to follow this model are vCloud-based clouds that leverage the capabilities of VMware to provide this level of infrastructural support.

The downside of the "design for failure" model is that you must "design for failure" up front.

The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment

Google Readies Behavioral Ads in Mobile Apps

Google is preparing to offer behaviorally targeted ads across its network of iOS and Android applications, as well as the ability to more accurately track conversions from handsets running on those platforms.

Individual mobile handsets possess unique ID numbers, or 'device identifiers,' to which Google plans on tying users' in-app behavior for the benefit of advertisers. To date, the company has refrained from making use of device IDs for ad purposes, perhaps owing to privacy concerns, but numerous competing firms already make use of the practice.

Google Readies Behavioral Ads in Mobile Apps | ClickZ