Last week RackSpace had an outage that impacted their cloud, Amazon (EC2) had a similar outage at their Virginia datacenter earlier this month. Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere are filled with predictions that these events are a black eye for cloud computing because sites like Brizzley and TechCrunch were down. The real reason those sites were offline has little to do with cloud computing. These sites were down because their cloud platform was located in single datacenter (Note – it is not uncommon for providers to host all of a clients cloud instances in single datacenter). When cloud providers offer support for multiple datacenters, clients have to expressly elect this option and pay extra for it. For example in the Amazon Cloud you can purchase additional instances in different availability zones. You are charged for the data transfer between instances plus the cost of the redundant instances, which can more than double the cost of your solution.
The reason many public clouds are hosted in a single facility is simple, there are significant cost involved with implementing global server load balancing and maintaining a hot secondary site. Early adaptors of the cloud (eg not enterprise customers) were often not willing to pay for this level of redundancy. While most cloud environments are highly available because of their lack of dependence on single hardware nodes they continue to be vulnerable to a failure of power or loss of connectivity at the facility in which they are housed. As enterprise customers have migrated to cloud computing environments, this has been part of the cloud that they understand least.
To ensure 100% uptime in the cloud IT Managers have to ask the appropriate questions of their provider then architect an appropriate solution. Key questions to ask potential cloud providers are:
· Where will my instances be hosted?
· Are cloud instances load-balanced with a secondary site? What technology do you use to accomplish this? How much does this cost?
· Will my instance fail-over to a secondary site if the primary site goes off-line? How long will it take?
Most of these details are typically covered in a providers SAS 70 audit, which your cloud vendor should provide to you if you sign a NDA. If your provider doesn’t fail over to a secondary datacenter, you can and should take care of this independently. The best practice would be to have primary and secondary providers for your cloud, synchronize your data between the two providers and decide how you want to fail-over if your primary provider fails. This strategy will significantly increase your monthly cost but greatly reduce the chance of downtime.
About Stacy Griggs
Stacy Griggs is Sr. Director of Customer Experience for Cbeyond Cloud Services , previously Stacy was the Vice President of Sales for MaximumASP which was acquired by Cbeyond in 2011. Cbeyond (NASD-CBEY) is a publicly traded provider of telecommunication and cloud services, which has been recognized by Microsoft at its 2009 Worldwide Hosting Partner of the Year and 2010 Hyper-V Cloud Provider of the Year. Prior to Cbeyond Stacy held a series of positions at Hosting.com including Chief Sales Officer, Chief Service Officer and General Manager for their flagship Delaware data center.
Stacy has led several information technology services companies over the last 15 years. He was a Managing Director for KForce a $1 Billion publicly traded professional services firm. At KForce Stacy managed 5 business units that collectively generated $18 Million in revenue and had 140 employees. Prior to KForce Stacy was a Vice President and part-owner of Diamond Technologies, an 80 employee custom software development firm. Previously Stacy held management positions at TMP Worldwide, the University of Pennsylvania, and Humana.
Through his theWHIR blog, Stacy will touch upon sales and service in the Web hosting space, web hosting events, cloud computing and industry trends.
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