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The cloud is not smart enough to be reliable, says uptime specialist
QUESTIONS need to be asked over whether the cloud is really up to the job of hosting critical services, according to resilience firm Neverfail.
Neverfail CTO Paddy Falls told The INQUIRER that following Amazon's recent outage firms need to ask "can you trust the cloud to give you sufficient resilience" in services? Amazon's most recent outage occurred last week, with initial reports suggesting that one of the firm's datacentres had succumbed to a lightning strike, only for that story to be changed to blame a dodgy electrical transformer.
Excuses aside, the downtime of Amazon's widely used cloud services left some web sites offline, something that many cloud users believe should not be possible thanks to the vast numbers of physical machines that make up a cloud. Falls suggests that companies shouldn't bank on the machines of a single provider to ensure resilience.
"Don't put all of your eggs in one cloud basket", said Falls, adding that customers should not "depend totally on just one provider". He said that in the foreseeable future most firms should look at having high availability services running locally with the cloud being used for disaster recovery.
Of particular interest was Falls' claim that today the weak link is not hardware but rather errors in configuration, adding that errors in configuring a virtual machine have a "ripple effect" on all services running on that virtual machine. While cloud providers, and to an extent hardware vendors, have been releasing ever more sophisticated hardware monitoring tools, Falls claims that what is needed is application level monitoring.
Falls also predicts system administrators will have to automate more and more tasks in order to keep up with the growing number of machines, both physical and virtual, in order to keep potential configuration errors to a minimum.
Even with better configuration, application level monitoring and general maturity in cloud deployment, Falls says that a self-healing cloud is still five years away. And for all the hype surrounding the cloud, the recent past has shown that companies clearly cannot rely on simply lobbing their applications onto a cloud and hoping that there is safety in numbers.
Falls' comments highlight the need for real software engineering when deploying services on the cloud rather than simply hoping that the marketing buzz surrounding the cloud is enough to keep their businesses ticking over. µ
Tags: Software
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Amazon is giving the cloud a bad name. Done right, it should work well and does have legitimate uses.
Amazon, however, have made a right mess of it and hurt it's credibility.
Right now I need a "Cloud" based solution for something I am writing, and there are two main difficulties:
(1) Sufficient multi-carrier redundancy of high enough quality to guarantee the service.
(2) The price is too high.
So, I am effectively having to implement my own "cloud" as I cannot rely on present services.
I think it just needs a few years to mature. Amazon is a bad company to pioneer it - they are a bunch of clowns.
(And Clowns who exploit their workforce too).
isn't it?
why do we even bother listening to pundits when we all know that the cloud leaks, the net leaks, in fact, the only secure knowledge is that which we don't know in the first place (al la rumsfield).
The cloud isn't smart enough, the Internet isn't secure enough..
ANY company stupid enough to place sensitive material, trade secrets, and or product designs on a server not under their control, deserves to have the random hacker come steal their stuff!
There's a simple reason why it's being called "The Cloud". Clouds leak... We call it rain. Going to be a sad day for the company that gets hit by the first internet hurricane.
We've gotten along without it so far. You can correlate the growth of the internet with the rise of the surveillance state. -- It's so obvious as to require no proof. -- Yet, this insane premise of storing all data "somewhere", tended by "someone", and in practice available to everyone, continues to be accepted. Of course, reason is, not coincidentally, that wise older heads are being replaced by skulls full of not even good gritty mush, just a thin consomme.
@SHOUTER: one of your better ones here.
WHAT YOU DO IS YOU COPY ALL YOUR CLOUD DATA ONTO A USB KEY FOB, APPS TOO FOR THAT MATTER. THEN WHENEVER YOU WANT ACCESS TO YOUR DATA, YOU JUST PLUG IN THE FOB! THEN YOU DONT EVEN NEED INTERNET ACCESS AT ALL TO ACCESS YOUR INFORMATION. LASTLY YOU CAN DELETE ALL YOUR DATA STORED ON THE CLOUD & KEEP 2 COPIES ON 2 SEPARATE FOBS, AND YOU HAVE PERFECT RELIABILITY.
PLUS, YOU CAN PUT A KEYFOB INTO A SAFE DEPOSIT BOX. THE BANK WONT LET YOU PUT ANY CLOUD INTO A SAFE DEPOSIT BOX (OR AT LEAST, THEY WON'T GUARANTEE IT WONT SEEP OUT).
SORTED.