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The Sidekick Failure and Cloud Culpability
miller60 writes "There's a vigorous debate among cloud pundits about whether the apparent loss of all Sidekick users' data is a reflection on the trustworthiness of cloud computing or simply another cautionary tale about poor backup practices. InformationWeek calls the incident 'a code red cloud disaster.' But some cloud technologists insist data center failures are not cloud failures. Is this distinction meaningful? Or does the cloud movement bear the burden of fuzzy definitions in assessing its shortcomings as well as its promise?"
As always, cloud computing/hosting/whatever is a vague term used like any other buzz term. I just see it as a platform where the resources should be allocated automatically and the underneath system takes care of having those available.
The same failure points are there. You're just putting the trust and management to someone else. Even if they do have backup plans and certain levels of redundancy, it can always fail. Cloud computing isn't something magical.
“Similarly datacenters fail, get disconnected, overheat, flood, burn to the ground and so on, but these events should not cause any more than a minor interruption for end users. Otherwise how are they different from ‘legacy’ web applications?”
That's because they aren't. The system is just managed by someone else, and its managed for thousands of people at the same time so its cheaper. Kind of like what Akamai has been doing for long with their content delivery network - it's cheaper for the providers because they dont have to build the infrastructure themself, and its cheaper for Akamai because they do it for so many clients.
Just like people lose their stuff on personal hard drives when not backed up, they will lose cloud data when not backed up. Both kinds of computing have merits, and long term persistence of data is not automatic with either. Most people do not place THAT hard a value on backups of their cell phones. They typically sync with a PC anyway. But any business that doesn't have weekly reliable offsite backups of their fundamental assets should be sued by shareholders/customers for irresponsibility weather they use cloud or not.
As a wise auditor once told me:
You can outsource the work, but you can not outsource the responsibility.
If your data is important to you - you must back it up, and you must test your backups.
The end.
-ted
Just because you're paying someone to store your data doesn't mean they care about that data as much as you do... That's one of the two big problems with cloud computing that can't be solved by technology. First, nobody cares about your data as much as you do. Second, nobody will protect your data (ie. control it's distribution and prevent unauthorized changes) to the level you find appropriate.
It's usually a good idea to avoid using broad generalities (like I just did), but it seems like in general it would be a bad idea to let someone else be the sole keeper of anything even remotely important or sensitive. There are exceptions, but those seem to be internal to a company (ie. the company runs it's own cloud and has all employees use it). Or military/government applications where centralized security and backup can keep user errors from becoming a real danger to the organization beyond "help I lost my email!".
When you cut through the "cloud", if you look into the center of things, you see that the so-called modern "cloud" computing environment is a giant computer(s), surrounded by high powered priestly geeks, doling out resources to everyone, completely centralized. The priests have some new tricks to entertain the masses with, but there's nothing fundamentally different between cloud computing and IBM's vision of computing in the 1960s.
This is my sig.
This is awfully convenient. Something that at least to my eyes looks a lot like a cloud crashes. Cloud pundits announce:
"if it loses your data - it's not a cloud".
So if Amazon's S3 ever fails horribly and loses everybody's data, then it wasn't a cloud either.
Well there is one difference. Cloud computing and virtual servers are to computers what keychains are to keys, it enables you to lose everything at once.
It's not really a difference. With home-grown datacenters you still have that risk unless you do something like building multiple redundant buildings in different locales and managing some kind of replication and backup strategy. But then all of that stuff is the same with going to a Cloud provider, except you're not having to futz around with the physical facilities yourself.
There's no magic. All we're seeing is stupid people getting burned because they didn't use basic due diligence.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
But if Akamai loses a server, I don't have to repopulate the gigs of data they're hosting for me - it's not lost, it's just no longer on that particular server that died. That's exactly why I consider Akamai to be "the cloud" and why it doesn't side like Danger was. Especially with an infrastructure like Akamai or Google where things are geographically distributed, you just don't hear about servers dying, and you might not even hear about data centers dying (unless it places an unusually high burden somewhere and causes performance issues - but you don't hear about data loss as a result).
I don't think that has anything to do with it; at least not for me. My main concern with cloud computing is trust. Do I trust someone other than myself to not fuck up and lose all my data? For critical data, the answer is no. If somebody is going to fuck up and lose all my data, it's going to be me. I don't know if all the data on a Sidekick would qualify as critical, but it would certainly be annoying as fuck to lose it all.
I'm a TMO subscriber, and I love them, so this is painful. And my sister-in-law is a longtime Sidekick user, so she's in a special agony.
But T-Mobile is in a potentially no-win situation. They obviously have to believe Danger/Microsoft that they have good processes to avoid and recover from such failures. They didn't, and now TMO is probably going to take the hit. On one hand, they should - if the service is important, take responsibility and ensure management. On the other hand, they have good assurances, so hey, how much is enough?
BlackBerry users, you should take note. Rim differs only in scale. Ahd, you hope, depth of resilience. Not that RIM hasn't had outages, though not total failure yet.
TMO may have to tell their Sidekick users to be prepared for the inevitable restore, and of course, work with Danger/Microsoft to re-establish service (even though they don't provide service, D/M does), and of course some money compensation no matter how inadequate.
And maybe offer them shiny new myTouch3Gs to give the disillusioned Sidekick users an option with a marginally better track record.
No, wait, that isn't right. I've had to wipe my G1 every update, and some apps don't have a way to save data. They just don't.
I'm glad I never got on the Sidekick train, but I have no hope that this won't some day hit me. Do you suppose the next major Sidekick update will include data backup? :)
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Danger held your data hostage from the start and didn't provide backup. Then, when Microsoft took them over, it was clear that they were going to mess with the service and servers. No backup + Microsoft mucking with the servers = kiss your data goodbye.
But that's no more an indictment of hosted services or "cloud computing" than a Windows BSOD is an indictment of desktop computing. Microsoft screwed up, and quite predictably, too.
Just define away your problems. ROFL.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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True, but how much more money and brain power does Google have to invest in datacenter design and disaster recovery than your local college?
Seriously.. I worked at one.. All our stuff was on "next day parts" from Dell.. We had a single internet connection to the campus, single linux based sendmail email server, etc.
Granted, I had tapes up the wazoo, and could retrieve any file for the past X years, but downtime is still downtime.
Then you have Google, with multiple sites, multiple connections, replication, Load balancers, etc.
Not only do they have more to invest, but when they call up a vendor and say "we are Google, we have an outage, and we need some things from you" I bet those vendors jump a little faster than when a local school IT guy calls them up..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
To be fair, Sidekick users didn't have a viable means to back up their personal data that was being pulled from Microsoft/Danger servers. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the users to find some hack or unofficial method to copy all their data from their devices. The only blame they could be assigned is that they bought the service being sold. Your criticism would be valid for, say, iPhone users, since the user has a backup stored on their computer. But no such functionality exists for the Sidekick, as far as I am aware.
And as to who is really being burned here.... Obviously not Microsoft/Danger. Microsoft doesn't give two shits about this, since their acquisition of Danger in 2008 was really about cannibalizing their talent for Windows Mobile 7, as the Pink project has shown. Danger is just a shell of its former self--the damage was done long before this latest failure, which I think was an inevitable consequence of the acquisition. The ones who got burned are T-Mobile (for trusting Microsoft to manage Danger, and Danger to maintain a proper backup solution), and of course, the consumers.
The real issue, of course, is that data is always at risk of being lost no matter how, where, or in what amount it is stored. The passage of time guarantees it. But people want to believe in the existence of certainties, in the notion that if something has a 99.9999% reliability, then we can effectively ignore the minuscule probability of failure. But failures happen all the time and there is no such guarantee. We need to rid ourselves of this delusion that data can somehow be made "safe," that risk can be ignored when made small. Cloud computing is just the flavor of the day.
I knew someone who worked at Danger years ago when the company was still fairly new. It was, at the time, an amazing technology. There was nothing like it. They had so much going for them, and there was a lot of good talent working there. One thing that impressed me was how they solved the problem of mobile web browsing. At the time, mobile web browsing seriously sucked ass. It was not only slow, but many sites simply would not load. Danger solved that by re-parsing the sites on their servers so that pages would look good and function properly on your mobile device. It was the best solution until mobile OSes and hardware became powerful and complex enough to support full browsing; and even then, the UI needed to be tightly integrated before browsing became efficient instead of tedious. It's sad to see such a pioneering company wither on the vine.
This all comes back to the thrust of the OP: whether the apparent loss of all Sidekick users' data is a reflection on the trustworthiness of cloud computing or simply another cautionary tale about poor backup practices.
The simple truth, of course, is that it is both. And the only solution here is the old one: if you want something done properly, you will have to do it yourself. If your data, documents or whatever are in any way important to you, you should not be relying on anyone else to keep them safe. Simple as that, and no excuses.