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How One Drunk Driver Sent My Company To the Cloud
snydeq writes "Andrew Oliver offers further proof that drunk driving and on-site servers don't mix. Oliver, who had earlier announced a New Year's resolution to go all-in on cloud services, had that business strategy expedited when a drunk driver, fleeing a hit-and-run, drove his SUV directly into the beauty shop next door to his company's main offices. 'Our servers were down for eight hours, and various services were intermittent for at least 12 hours. Had things been worse, we could have lost everything. Like our customers, we needed HA and DR. Moreover, we thought, maybe our critical services like email, our website, and Jira should be in a real data center. This made going all-cloud a top priority for us rather than "when we get to it."' Oliver writes, detailing his company's resultant hurry-up migration plan to 100 percent cloud services."
or is it just the name for all datacenter hosted servers now? (trick question.. it is).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
This story isn't remarkable is it. Man shocked when putting all eggs in one basket is a bad idea. Solution: put all eggs in another basket. DR is what colocation and failover is for. The cloud doesn't magically make you impervious to disasters.
If a single drunk driver is able to stop your production and that production is critical you are doing something wrong to begin with. While the cloud might (and probably will) offer better HA and DR it will not fix a bad design by itself. The article also states: " I didn't want to create my own internal IT department". I' guessing Andrew Oliver is a PHB.
Moving to the cloud doesn't solve this, per se, if you move all your infrastructure to say Amazon you're still beholden to that company and its internal procedures. A system administration on their part could easily render you down for many hours.
A data loss on their part could render you down permanently; Do you have a SLA? Do you have proof that your cloud vendors have DR solutions?
What is your action plan if your leased-line WAN goes down, and your internet service provider tells you that it will be 48 to 72 hours to resolve? May be a fiber cut, or worse. Drunk drivers can take down networks and POPs too.
What is your action plan if your leased-line WAN goes down, and your internet service provider tells you that it will be 48 to 72 hours to resolve? May be a fiber cut, or worse. Drunk drivers can take down networks and POPs too.
When your complete IT is based on SaaS, just send everyone home and let them work from home. All the tools they need are "in the cloud" (or however plain old internet is called today)
bickerdyke
And besides, if you've shared your data with some company, the government no longer considers it your private data.
Just another day in Paradise
If a single drunk driver is able to stop your production and that production is critical you are doing something wrong to begin with. While the cloud might (and probably will) offer better HA and DR it will not fix a bad design by itself.
The article also states: " I didn't want to create my own internal IT department". I' guessing Andrew Oliver is a PHB.
Because cloud services have never had extended outages...
Honestly, anyone who sees cloud services as the great fix for reliability problems is an idiot, especially reliability problems caused by a once-in-a-lifetime drunk-driver incident. Most of the cloud services seem to have had their fair share of incompetence-related downtime. I wouldn't mind betting that if he'd put all his IT stuff one one of the commercial cloud platforms for the last 2 years, he would've had more downtime than he had running them in his offices.
In any case, shoving stuff in the cloud doesn't absolve you of needing a competent IT admin to handle backups and such, unless you're insane enough to trust *everything* to a cloud operator who, at the end of the day, doesn't actually give too much of a crap about one tiny customer who might've lost all their data.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Yup. It is all fancy way to tell services are not in a local closet, but in a specialized center.
It all seems fancy, until you hit downtime, and your SLA happens to be "best effort" and the response time is nothing more than someon looked at it within a certain time. You will never get a sla that returns money for the lost productivity.
You will still have to figure out how to get your backups regularly out of the cloud, and retreive the data if the cloud operator stops. You will have to provide a fast internet link, or maybe even a double link, since if one provider fails, it might be cheaper to have a second provider instead of having one with a expensive business SLA.
Stating "put it in the cloud"sounds simple, but a lot of details are really important. Notice how the Tarticle is a consulting firm in such things? and even they hoose to do in inhouse for quite some time?
What happens when a 'drunken' MBA cancels the service. Or a drunken admin deprovisions the wrong servers?
Silence is a state of mime.
Fake story. Obviously marketing hype for cloud services fad. Reminds me of Y2K
I understand it when people with no knowledge go on about Y2K as some sort of hoax. I despair when it comes from people that should no better.
Any idea why Y2K didn't have the massive impact it could have? Would it be the massive effort testing and patching things to prevent it being a problem. Maybe we should have just left things and picked up the pieces afterwards. Yeah that would have been good. I know for a fact that there would have been issues with the emergency number (999) in the UK. Can you be sure that things would have worked wherever you're from?
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
"How One Bolting Horse Sent My Company Close The Stable Door: We had no high availability or disaster recovery in place, so when a disaster happened our systems weren't available and we couldn't recover from it. That was bad, so we fixed it."
Next week's article will be "How Losing All Of Our Data Made My Company Start Making Backups", followed in September by "How Losing All Of Our Data A Second Time Made My Company Start Testing The Backups Too".