This blog post is long overdue but the recent events that affected customers using Amazon Web Services sparked an increased priority in my mind. I have long been an advocate of Amazon’s amazing efforts driving cloud computing to fruition. And the current unfortunate events have not changed my attitude towards them. Amazon is amazing!

Really amazing! And GoGrid is really thankful.

Thank goodness Werner Vogels keeps getting up on stage with incredible success stories. Werner’s slides featuring Amazon’s growth statistics are so awesome that I bet they make Al Gore jealous. And that isn’t a tongue-in-cheek quip because Al Gore gave birth to the Internet. This isn’t a tongue-in-cheek blog-post. This is a hearty high-five to Amazon from GoGrid. The convenient truth for GoGrid is that when Werner takes the stage, it feels like he’ll need a ladder to show us how incredible the adoption is of AWS.

Can you imagine a world without Amazon? The whole “cloud” revolution probably wouldn’t be happening. SalesForce had been doing their thing for about a decade but it wasn’t until Amazon Web Services geared up that the whole “cloud” thing started cranking.

• No great brand-name company was going to bring cloud computing to market because they’ve been watching a bookstore eat their lunch now for years and they still haven’t done anything relevant. I’m talking about computing giants like IBM, HP, Dell, and Cisco or telecom service providers like AT&T and Verizon. Sun was gonna do something relevant about 2 years ago but Larry pulled the plug on that. Amazon has declared an entirely new style of computing that will define the future, and the big-names just seem to be watching. Wake up! What is going through your dino-minds? There is a new Sheriff in town. Do you still think that Amazon is just an attempt to sell excess bookstore infrastructure that they didn’t need at Christmas? Amazon-dot-com faced an incredible IT challenge and so they invented an entirely new style of massively multi-tenant, incredibly scalable, programmable, on-demand infrastructure. Smell the Java ©!
• Countless technology start-ups would never have started. Amazon established an entirely new paradigm that has changed the game for entrepreneurs in several great ways. First of all, Amazon enables bunches of new businesses that simply couldn’t have existed even if they had the capital. The best examples of these are the companies that simply grew too fast to get their needs met without programmable and massively scalable on-demand infrastructure.
• Amazon has done wonders for the psyche of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs feel empowered. There is a new consensus that a company can be started for almost nothing whereas it used to feel like a start-up needed $10,000,000. Entrepreneurs are liberated because they know that they can scale their cost of goods sold with their revenues and that they don’t need any CapEx. Amazon is a bigger friend to tech start-ups than venture capital and has become a comparable engine for growth in our economy.
• OpenStack wouldn’t exist. OpenStack was invented to compete with Amazon. RackSpace never would have purchased SliceHost and jumped into the cloud game. RackSpace wouldn’t have needed a “cloud” strategy ‘cause their core business was doing great.
• And last but not least, people wouldn’t care so much about GoGrid. We’re proud to have pioneered cloud computing alongside Amazon, but if we had done it alone it might be comparable to a tree falling in the forest. We had load balanced cloud servers years before Amazon, and load balancing is core to elasticity which is a defining attribute of cloud computing, but not as many people would have noticed. We also were way ahead of Amazon with on-demand Windows servers, real VLANs, dedicated servers, Hosted Private Cloud and bunches of other things but you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog-post if it weren’t for Amazon. We take great pride in having a feature-set that our customers and industry analysts alike consider to be the most comparable to Amazon’s. We’re headquartered in San Francisco and quite good at R&D ourselves and we also are pushing the industry forward. GoGrid got into the game trying to solve a different problem than Amazon, we were trying to automate managed hosting, but we’ve both ended up in nearly the same wonderful place…the cloud!

So thank you Amazon! You’ve done the World a great service!

Love,

John Keagy

CEO
GoGrid

We recently hosted a joint webinar with Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu project, and discussed Ubuntu in the GoGrid cloud. I had the privilege of hosting this webinar with Nick Barcet, Canonical Cloud Solution Lead, and Zane Williamson, GoGrid Key Accounts System Administrator.

This webinar focuses on the relationship between Ubuntu and cloud infrastructure, how open-source software is fueling innovation and some examples of an Ubuntu environment on GoGrid.

If you weren’t able to make the live webinar, don’t worry because we recorded and it’s available on demand!

This is a really educational webinar that covers a lot of content. Ubuntu in the GoGrid cloud discusses the following topics:

• An overview of the cloud landscape
• A Ubuntu retrospective
• Ubuntu server adoption statistics
• Benefits of Ubuntu in the GoGrid Cloud
• Use cases – applications best suited for Ubuntu
• Q&A

Whether you’re a Linux expert or just getting started with open-source software, we’re sure you’ll enjoy this recorded webinar.

Click here to view the webinar.

Yesterday we pushed out some enhancements to the Billing section of the GoGrid customer portal. As we mentioned previously, recently we have been focusing on the “billing experience”. In March, we provided three important updates to Billing which included: Monthly Invoices, Account Plan Changes and Usage reporting. Yesterday, we rolled out some enhancements and updates to the Billing section, specifically, the “Payments and Invoices” area.

To access this updated functionality, simply navigate to: My Account > Billing. Once there, you can click on the “Payments and Invoices” section within the Billing Menu:

From there, you will see the latest 10 Payments and 10 Invoices. (Note that the pictures used in this post are from an Employee account on GoGrid and may not reflect all possible scenarios that a GoGrid customer might see.)

The Items are sorted by Date.

Fields displayed for Payments are:

• Number – this is the unique payment number. Note that if you click on the hyperlinked number, you can see the Payment Details.
• Date – this is the date that the payment posted to your account.
• Method – various payment methods could be displayed here depending on your contract (e.g., Check, Visa, Cash, etc.).
• Amount – this is the amount of the payment.
• Applied – this is the amount that was applied against a payment.

Fields displayed for Invoices are:

• Number – this is the unique invoice number. Note that if you click on the hyperlinked number, you can see the Invoice Details.
• Date – this is the date of the invoice.
• Amount – this is the amount of the invoice. It could be a positive or negative (in parenthesis) amount depending on if it is a payment or charge.
• Balance Due – this is the total amount due on your account and reflects payments or charges applied to your account.

Clicking on a specific Payment number will provide all of the details of that payment and show all of the invoices that the payment applied to.

Below the Payment Details are the Invoices Paid by that payment, for example:

The Invoice Details shows line items of various charges on your account, including Memory and Transfer Plans, Overages (if any), Cloud Storage, Server Charges, and other related items. You can see the same Invoice details if you click on one of the linked Invoice Numbers on the summary screen:

When you couple the updated Payments and Invoices section with our recently introduced Usage feature (you can read more about it in this post), you get enhanced visibility into your GoGrid account. Briefly, the Usage section allows you to get both a summary and details on various Metered and Fixed Services within GoGrid. It is located under the “My Account” section. Below is the Usage Summary for the Current Period:

To download the details as a CSV file, simply choose the Billing Period that you want and click the “Download Usage Report” in the left bar:

With the recent updates and changes to the Billing Process, the new Payments and Invoices section and the Usage feature, we believe that you should now have very powerful insight into the Billing and Usage of your GoGrid account. As we continue to evolve these features and improve on them, we are always looking for feedback and ideas so please leave a comment on anything related to this that you feel you would like to share.

In January and February of 2011, GoGrid polled over 500 IT professionals, CTOs and developers and asked for their thoughts on cloud computing, how they currently use the cloud and where they think the industry is headed. The results of this survey shed new light on how the cloud stands in 2011 and what we can expect as we move towards 2012.

We have taken the key findings of the survey and created several interesting charts and graphics. Because of the extensive nature of the survey, we will be releasing the findings in topical blog posts over the coming months, but you can download the full survey results data at any time by clicking here.

With much speculation and debate about what cloud computing is, the first questions we asked the industry is what they believe cloud computing encompassed – Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (SaaS).

Question: When you think of “cloud”, what does it mean to you? What does the “cloud” encompass?

As seen in the responses to this question the majority of IT professionals are in agreement that all 3 services make up cloud computing, but emphasized Software as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service. More importantly, we wanted to know what percentage of the IT industry actually uses cloud technology for their business. Most people are familiar with SaaS (e.g., Gmail and SalesForce). But interestingly, IaaS seems to be almost on par with SaaS according to respondents.

Questions: Using your answer from question #1, are you currently using the cloud?

According to our respondents, 65% of IT professionals surveyed use cloud computing services. These findings highlight the fact that the industry is growing more accustomed to what cloud computing is and are beginning to migrate to using cloud services in their work and daily lives. This could be from a purely experimental perspective, or project-related. Others are implementing pure cloud infrastructure as a replacement for bare metal environments. And yet others might be creating hybrid hosting infrastructures as well. Obviously, the possibilities are countless.

To learn more about our survey methodology or to see all the results and data, please download the GoGrid Cloud Survey Report.