Disputing the Myths of Cloud Downtime
Posted by Jim Reavis on September 22, 2011
Whether you are immersed in the cloud market like me or not, it’s been hard to miss the news stories about system downtime and other problems at some cloud providers. I think it is worth analyzing the record to determine if we can trust cloud computing. And I go into this with the clear bias of believing that the cloud is as secure if not more secure than traditional infrastructure if implemented and architected responsibly.
I believe the record is actually fairly good for major public cloud providers. I have no doubt that the media would love to publish sensational stories about major crashes and security breaches at these companies, and there is really very little a large provider could do to stop these stories. The very nature of a service made broadly available to consumers across the Internet is that it is much more transparent. A few thousand people simultaneously tweeting at once about a problem is pretty hard to contain.
One of the issues that has come up relates to downtime within Amazon Web Services, including the 2 most popular services, Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Simple Storage Services (S3). I have been able to spend some time talking to customers of these services. What I found is that the impact of this downtime varied widely with customers based on their own proactive decisions as to how they were going to use these services.
Essentially, the customers that had a strategy to implement redundancy and a high-availability architecture felt little to no impact. In some cases this greater resiliency was achieved by working directly with Amazon. In other instances it was achieved by working with third party solutions that provided a layer between the customer and AWS, and even incorporated other cloud providers. Customers without redundancy plans were by and large the customers that suffered the greatest.
No IT system will be 100% secure, and we will always hear about incidents in the cloud. The level of noise about problems in the cloud pales in comparison to the well documented incidents impacting other forms of IT. What is also clear to me is that customers that take security, reliability and integrity in the cloud seriously are able to achieve it.
We have several decades of experience in developing enterprise architectures to manage complex systems, and we cannot throw these concepts out the window. We certainly have more work to do, on all fronts, but this is a shared responsibility between providers and customers. We all have a role to play in making cloud computing even better.
Tags: Amazon, AWS, Cloud Computing, cloud platform, CSA, EC2, S3
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