Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Doug Henschen.
When this winter's ice storms, artic deep freezes, and nasty nor'easters hit, it provided a good time to hunker down and get some inside projects done. Weather Company CIO Bryson Koehler has been working on a big one: consolidating 13 datacenters down to four, relying extensively on public cloud providers, and moving to a NoSQL-powered big-data platform.
When we last spoke to Koehler his company was preparing to move its Weather Underground business onto the new big-data platform, which runs the Riak database on Amazon public cloud computing resources, with backup resources on the Google Compute Cloud. Next up, plans called for the flagship Weather Channel to move to that same platform within a matter of weeks. Koehler's team has learned some key lessons along the way, particularly about the challenge of predicting costs when using external cloud services...
