Researcher: Interdependencies Could Lead To Cloud 'Meltdowns'

alphadogg writes "As the use of cloud computing becomes more and more mainstream, serious operational 'meltdowns' could arise as end-users and vendors mix, match and bundle services for various means, a researcher argues in a new paper set for discussion next week at the USENIX HotCloud '12 conference in Boston. 'As diverse, independently developed cloud services share ever more fluidly and aggressively multiplexed hardware resource pools, unpredictable interactions between load-balancing and other reactive mechanisms could lead to dynamic instabilities or "meltdowns,"' Yale University researcher and assistant computer science professor Bryan Ford wrote in the paper. Ford compared this scenario to the intertwining, complex relationships and structures that helped contribute to the global financial crisis."

Comments

This is why you cloud your cloud...

[houstonbofh]

If you have a critical service, have it at more than one host... That way when AWS has a bad hair day, you are still up.

Or, have your entire business totally dependent one someone else. (Sounds kinda scary that way, don't it?)

Re:This is why you cloud your cloud...

[martin-boundary]

There's a limited number of cloud hardware providers on the internet, and the rest are middle men. It's useless to diversify yourself on the middle men, they will all be affected when the common underlying hardware provider has an issue. Thus there's a limit to the reliability that can be achieved, irrespective of how much mixing and matching is performed at the "business end".

Diversification only "works" when the alternatives are provably independent. That's not true in a highly interconnected and interdependent world, which is TFA's point, I believe.

The analogy the author uses doesn't work.

[stephanruby]

The analogy the author uses doesn't work.

A better analogy would be the airline industry. The airline industry likes to over-book airplane seats it may not have because it's always trying to optimize its profit-margin.

The same will happen with cloud-services. Cloud-services will always try to optimize their own profit-margins, at the risk of triggering significant outages.

And I don't see what this has to do with the financial crisis at all.

Re:The analogy the author uses doesn't work.

[pitchpipe]

A better analogy would be the airline industry.

I think a better analogy is the power grid. System hits a peak, one line goes down, others try to compensate becoming overloaded, another can't handle the load and goes down, and behold: cascading failures.

just like mainframes

[Dan667]

I think it is funny that lessons learned years ago with mainframes are being presented as new by just changing the word mainframe to cloud.