At Times, I Fear the Cloud
I’m not an alarmist by nature. So I bring up the following not as a "pile-on" but rather as a "you should know about this…" Did you hear about the power outages from Amazon and Microsoft’s European cloud services? Sigh.
It’s real, and it shouldn’t have happened in my humble opinion.
It’s not that I expect perfection from the cloud-based services… Well, OK. So I do, given their claims of zero downtime and so-on. I also think that we should/could have learned more from traditional data centers. These are supposed to be the best of the best, the untouchable data centers?! Worse, it’s not like it’s a single location or vendor – TWO vendors (Microsoft, Amazon) were impacted, which means we’re really not gaining in geographic separation, nor other technologies that I have thought came along for the ride when you use a cloud-based provider that claims no downtime.
OK, so all of that aside, my real worry? That people will see this and question the viability of the cloud overall as a solution platform. That we’ll start judging as we’re learning, that we’ll stop believing it’s worth the work to make it "right."
I really hope that some of the things we’ve been preaching for years are applied to these data centers. Data centers are supposed to take into account "the unbelievably unexpected, extreme situations" (my terms) and bring geographic and other failover to the picture in the case of a catastrophic failure. This is something data centers have been expected to provide at this extreme level of service.
I hope this is a wake-up call to cloud providers – a wake up call to expect and provide for catastrophic failure protection and recovery and failover. While I’m sincerely in awe of the datacenters that are being created, we have a ways to go to fulfill the promise of cloud-based services. I still think it’s the direction we should be headed in smart ways, just be prepared to accomodate truly impactful situations like this… just like you would if the systems were in-house.
What do you think? Let me know…