Them interwebs are abuzz with cloud failure. Some point to AWS being not architected correctly and quick suggest in the same breath how their new, cool product will solve all these issues. Some point to the failure of the cloud as a concept (“See I told you! now sign here to build my own datacenter”) and use it continually to advance their own agendas and reinforce their continual biases.
My view is that this is not an isolated incident – Data centers, whether owned or rented, on-premise or hosted or on-cloud, all fail. In fact, that’s the reason its four 9′s or five 9′s – never 100%!
As an enterprise, remember that the job of the CIO is to anticipate this risk of technology failure and plan for it. Disaster recovery is not new. So why is it that in this case companies that are complaining about AWS downtime are not talking about their DR plans? How come we dont have ONE company that is able to tout that despite AWS being their primary cloud provider, their operations continued to work without a hitch?
This is not a technical failure, its a business failure. It’s a belief that AWS is so big and so very well engineered that it will never go down. But this black swan incident is just first of many.
So if I were you, I’d go back to first principles – dust off the DR manual and look deeper into providing redundancy. One provider is NOT enough. Even in the cloud with all its supposed magic, it will take two to tango.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | AWS Fail, Disaster Recovery, IaaS
