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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.
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.
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
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?
Amazon Cloud Service Hit By Car Crash
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
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.