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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?"
It's usually a decision on management's side to not use best practices, despite warnings from the tech dept.
tldr; There's nothing wrong with the technology, just the greedy bastards using it.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Didn't that throw up any red flags for ANYONE?
This is an unforeseen hole in the bulletproof Gandhi mechanism, so I foresee a quick "GPL V3.1" to close this.
It already exists. It is called AGPL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGPL/
Deze sig is in 't Nederlands geschreven.
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.
Didn't that throw up any red flags for ANYONE?
I was a Sidekick user from 4/2004 until 10/2008. There had been only one 'catastrophic' failure in that time that left Sidekick users without data service for an extended period. Danger produced one of the best mobile devices, which in many ways is still better than anything out there even though the OS and devices that utilize it (the various Sidekick models that exist these days) is quite a bit outdated compared to devices like the iPhone.
I miss my Sidekick immensely. I loved true multitasking, a fully capable QWERTY keyboard, and incredible battery life. Unfortunately it didn't sync well with calendaring software, didn't keep up with music playing, and is now partially controlled by Microsoft. There have been immense trade offs with moving to the iPhone but based on my main reason for owning an iPhone (I ride the bus and enjoy the music/video player and screen size) it was the right choice for me.
That said, "cloud computing" is something which usually works (and did, in the case of the Sidekick since 2002). I don't think that this is a proven warning sign that "cloud computing" isn't as reliable as everyone believes, I just think it's proof that companies need to do a much better job of ensuring data integrity than they could have ever imagined before.
Will I stop using Flickr, Google products, and other future "cloud" devices/software because of this? No. I am smart enough, as a computer savvy end-user, to keep my own backups of my data but I do believe people need to become better educated in what can and will happen as we move to the model we have slowly done in the last 10 years.
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!".
Leaving aside the fact that a "data center" could consist of two servers under Mabel's desk, this is not a "data center" disaster, nor is it a cloud catastrophe.
This a contract and contract management failure: the contract with the outsource was probably written without specifying that they must do the backups, AND no one established any sort of audit (formal or informal) test to ensure that there _were_ backups being taken and that the outsourcer was performing according to the contract.
Too often, the MBA doing the contract thinks "there, that's handled" once they've gotten all the signatures on the dotted line. "There, backups are handled now" he thinks, because many business folk (not ALL, I don't think it's fair to generalize that far) see these kinds of things as milestones, rather than ongoing processes to be managed.
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.
If someone tells you that they can cheaply prevent catastrophic failure, expect a catastrophic failure. Nothing can correct something like this, which involved an error propagating to the backups.
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.
No it's cold. Besides how am I going to watch these latest episodes of Stargate and Eureka if I'm outside playing with the squirrels and birds?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Tip: If you want to link to specific part in youtube video, you can add #t=1m3s etc on it, ie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcFUDvTFokg#t=1m40s
Also adding &hd=1 gives hq/hd version.
We'll, I was hoping to just google cloud vs. grid vs. distributed vs. cluster vs. etc. computing, but there doesn't seem to be much official-sounding distinction out there. Which means if we start our own thread here it might become definitive!
"cloud" computing: fluffy term used by people who really don't know anything other than that they run their applications from a web page and their data appears to be stored on the web because they can access it from more than one web browser.
"hosted" / "server farm" computing: buying server resources from someone who has a real datacenter who tries to take care of your hardware. You access all of your data over the network "cloud". Redundancy & support varies based on pricing & services.
"grid" / "utility" computing: computing infrastructure where you should be able to simply scale up CPU, data, etc. resources for your operation simply by throwing money at turning on more boxes. You don't necessarily need to share it with others, though.
"cluster" computing: a computing system made up of more or less independent, generally homogeneous nodes, where problems can be partitioned out. Generally has some form of redundancy so you don't lose work when a single node dies, but probably won't survive a data center failure.
"distributed" computing: special applications that can be farmed out to the net to break parts of computing or storage across a heterogeneous network of computers distributed over many locations. Ideally it's written to be highly redundant and tolerate faults such as nodes joining / leaving the cluster.
As far as reliability goes, the TIA data center tiers seems to be the only common way of talking about maintaining "business continuity". I've read through it briefly, and can somewhat paraphrase the intent (mildly inaccurately, mostly because the standard itself is kinda loose and not defined in too much detail with regards to servers) as:
Tier 1 "basic" : You have a room for servers with a door to keep random people from tripping over the plugs. Maybe you have a UPS on your server so it can do a graceful shutdown without data loss when the power or AC goes out.
Tier 2 : You have your stuff in racks with a raised floor for air conditioning and some wire racks hanging from the ceiling for cable management.
Tier 3 : You have redundant UPS's and RAIDs, CRACs, network links, and stuff, so you can make repairs when common things break without turning off the system (typically anything with moving parts or high currents, like power supplies, fans, disks, batteries needs to be hot-swappable). Which means you should also have some sort of monitoring and alert system so you know when that stuff actually fails so you can replace it before the redundant components also fail. This is intended to reach 24x7 availability with high uptimes... , maybe 3-5 nines.
Tier 4 : Like Tier 3, but certified for mission-critical / life-critical use, like in hospitals and maybe for airplanes and stuff. It should survive prolonged power outages (so you have a diesel generator with a day or two worth of fuel.)
Unfortunately, it just covers build specs for individual data centers, so it doesn't really cover other business continuity things like maintaining offsite backups so you can somewhat easily rebuild from scratch if a natural disaster takes out one of your data centers or something. But it's kind of different worlds of IT between designing facilities and architecting "cloud" services, which unfortunately don't seem to communicate or collaborate as much as they should to reach the kinds of "distributed grid of redundant load-sharing data centers" configurations we'd expect.
Cloud architecture shards data
In this case it certainly did.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
The TOS probably made the users aware that "your data is in Danger" so they can't complain now :-)
Mod the parent up!
There are two sides to this (at least). If you're moving your data "to the cloud" you'd expect that "the cloud" is one hell of a lot more reliable than you are. Let's face it, they should be - the economics of scale mean it's a lot cheaper for them to host your data and lots of other's data, than it is for you alone.
But that isn't what's happened in this case, here Microsoft (!) haven't even covered the basics. This is stunning.
So does this call into question "cloud computing" or just Microsoft's "cloud computing"? This is a difficult question to answer, without being able to see for yourself your cloud partner's infrastructure and procedures you can't really be sure... But would anyone make such a foolish mistake? Microsoft have proven that the answer is "yes, if it's Microsoft", the real question is should that be just: "yes"?
I think most of us now want a more hybrid approach, "in the cloud" is nice, but I also want a "local copy".
Then you have to think about the other kind of "lose" where others gain access to data they shouldn't see...
"According to some reports, the failure was due to a SAN (Storage Area Network) gone wrong at Microsoft's end. It is claimed that Microsoft does not have a working backup of some of the data that has gone missing from customers devices. The SAN upgrade is rumoured to have been outsourced to Hitachi to complete"
"Microsoft, possibly trying to compensate for lost and / or laid-off Danger employees, outsources an upgrade of its Sidekick SAN to Hitachi, which -- for reasons unknown -- fails to make a backup before starting"