Tossing a few links out there…

In the weekend’s biggest cloud news, Microsoft’s Azure was down for 22 hours. It’s now back up, with no root cause known.

Geva Perry has posted a useful Zoho Sheet calculator for figuring out whether an Amazon EC2 reserved instance will save you money over an unreserved instance.

Craig Balding has posted a down-to-earth dissection of PCI compliance in the cloud, and the practical reality that cloud infrastructure providers tend to deal with PCI compliance by encouraging you to push the actual payment stuff off to third parties.