When the Cloud Breaks or How You Still Shouldn’t Whine So Much
By: Bill Mathews
This is the follow up to my award-winning post “Why the Cloud Matters” (okay so it hasn’t won any awards yet but it did win some enemies). This post is dedicated to all the DMs I received via Twitter (runs on the cloud) about that article.
Many folks seemed to think that I was singing the cloud’s praises and speaking nothing of its many faults. This is patently untrue. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I pretty much dislike almost everything and find fault in nearly everything – the cloud is no different. A lot of applications in the cloud have many, many issues. For instance Twitter, which runs in the “cloud”, has its own share of documented issues. From being over-capacity (hello fail whale) to just simply being down, cloud failures do happen and it is not a nirvana. Gmail has developed quite a reputation (unfairly some would say) for being down. Here’s the challenge I have for you though: Measure your network and application uptime against theirs. Let me know the results.
What do you do when the cloud breaks? Lots of prayer if you’re into that sort of thing, then you really dig in. If it’s a software or infrastructure as a service you really have no choice but to wait, it’s not your code or your servers so waiting it out is really the only option. I know that sounds terrible (and it is believe me) but no one is more motivated to keep their systems up than these providers. Every minute they’re not up is a minute they’re not billing you, they don’t want that. Economically speaking it’s in their best interest to keep their stuff running. This may sound like common sense but there are a lot of FUD spreading folks out there basically claiming that Google and Amazon just throw things up there and put no thought into it. I’m not going to go so far as to say they put the stuff up there and never under-think anything, but chances are if they’re putting something up for you to pay for then they’re going to want to make sure it is available as much as possible.
DON’T PANIC
What improvements would I like to see from these sorts of providers? Logs, logs and more logs. Let me know what’s going on with my instance of the application, a little more truth in monitoring. If something is down, let me know so I can work around it. Don’t make me find out by hitting refresh and waiting until you timeout. Every cloud provider should have both a truthful status dashboard and an emergency broadcast Twitter account (that maybe sends to Facebook and Google+ too for good measure), when there’s an outage. The guys over at 37signals do this very well with their Twitter account whenever their Basecamp or related services are down or have other issues. It wins with their customers because they’re being upfront and honest about it. We’ll be launching a few cloud based services very soon and believe me this sort of approach will be baked in.
My overall point isn’t to be a giant cheerleader for the cloud, it doesn’t need me to do that. But to get smart and good people to lay down their fears and try something new. A lot of these folks can bring a lot to the various realms of cloud security and can help make massive improvements. Instead of saying “No, no, no,” I’m just looking for an “Okay, let’s try it out and see what happens.” Is that too much to ask?
