[semi-serious]Why the cloud isn't all that it's cracked up to be...

It's incidences like this that make me wary of putting data into the cloud...
American Eagle Outfitters learns a painful service provider lesson

Discuss, rant, mock, {insert your own action here} as you deem fit.

-tg

Simply outsourcing your computer hosting isn't cloud computing.

It sounds like a typical Web application hosting scenario with IBM as the hosting vendor. Their Oracle database fell over when a primary and then secondary drive failed (RAID?), then Oracle couldn't restore from backups, and then it turned out the D/R site was "not ready."

There is no question there are lessons to be learned here. I won't be surprised to find that IBM was doing everything it was contracted to do though.

They'd probably be even worse off if they'd hosted this in-house.

I will offer my ranting. Rant, rant, rant. Ranting completed.

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Originally Posted by dilettante

They'd probably be even worse off if they'd hosted this in-house.

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Why would you say that? I would think just the opposite.

Almost every task my company has outsourced since about 1998 has eventually made its way back in-house because it turns out that the outsourcing companies weren't performing up to par.

You're right, my bad, I interpreted the "off-site hosting facility" mean cloud storage... even still... goes to show the precarious nature of things like that and the need to companies who are going to heavily rely on their partners like that to ensure that proper procedures are being followed.

Conclusion - back up and back up often, AND on a regular basis do a recovery drill.

EntityX - noted. However you forgot the mocking module. Please perform a systems check and restore the mock module.

-tg

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Originally Posted by techgnome

EntityX - noted. However you forgot the mocking module. Please perform a systems check and restore the mock module.

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Backup corrupted. Restore Aborted. Would you like to continue?

I detect a pattern.... Virginia's IT outage continues, 7 agencies affected...

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state agencies continue to experience problems with data access due to an outage related to problems in a storage-area network (SAN) that began last week in a data center run by outsourcer Northrop Grumman.

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I see that EntityX has outsourced the hosting of his mock module...

-td

Famous last words - "What could possibly go wrong?"

I don't think its an issue with the cloud. I think it is an issue where people tend to think they are more ready for primary failure of their services and hardware than they actually are.

The exact same scenario could play out if it was local and not in the cloud.

Bottom line is people should actually audit and test their backup and recovery procedures often to make sure they actually will work when the times comes to use them for real, otherwise they are just asking for this type of thing to happen.

Even your personal computer can suffer the same fate. Often times people think they are backing up all their data, only to find out when they have a total system failure, that they were only backing up SOME of the data, or that the last backup actually was 6 months ago and the backup has been failing every night since...

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Originally Posted by Hack

Why would you say that? I would think just the opposite.

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I didn't mean it as a blanket endorsement of infrastructure outsourcing. I just know how hidebound and bureaucratic our own IT infrastructure has become after a number of consolidations. We've had our share of "fun" with hardware failures and problems with backups that won't restore.

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Originally Posted by abhijit

Famous last words - "What could possibly go wrong?"

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Yeah, kind-of similar to what you hear from pilots just before they have a gear-up crash landing: "I've never had a gear-up landing".

-Max :D

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Originally Posted by techgnome

I detect a pattern.... Virginia's IT outage continues, 7 agencies affected...


I see that EntityX has outsourced the hosting of his mock module...

-td

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I like the part where they made the contract more stringent, supposedly more reliable, and spent an extra 100 million to do so. The basic sales pitch comes out to this: We'll do it for X amount. We'll do it right for X+Y.

Better yet, they still screwed it up.

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Originally Posted by techgnome

EntityX - noted. However you forgot the mocking module. Please perform a systems check and restore the mock module.

-tg

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Enabling mock module. muck, mook, murk, meek. Mock module needs debugging.

Enabling debugged mock module. Mock, mock, mock. Mocking completed.

All ranting and mocking completed.

That was a good article. The only question is, are people going to learn from it?

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I don't think its an issue with the cloud. I think it is an issue where people tend to think they are more ready for primary failure of their services and hardware than they actually are.

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I have to agree, they have a lack of a proper Disaster recovery process. Most places i have worked really fall down on this. And the big failure is that even if they do have DR in place they fail to test it and do a dry run and see if it works properly.

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That was a good article. The only question is, are people going to learn from it?

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No, not while the accountant are in charge anyway. I see more and more outsourcing going on because on the surface it looks cheap to the bottom line, and generally it doesn't work very well.

My work has recently outsourced a development project to build an entirely new product, and i was speaking to one of testers yesterday who told me that this project is supposed to be complete in the next week, yet he couldn't even install it until this week, and virtually everything he does outside of expected process breaks.

I have yet to see a really good outsourced project.

As the original post was about Cloud computing i will answer that too. :D It seems to me that Cloud computing could work in some circumstances but i personally would be worried about using the Cloud for any major size product at the moment until it has more of a track record, and until i actually see some big companies show it working on there products.

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Originally Posted by NeedSomeAnswers

No, not while the accountant are in charge anyway. I see more and more outsourcing going on because on the surface it looks cheap to the bottom line, and generally it doesn't work very well.

My work has recently outsourced a development project to build an entirely new product, and i was speaking to one of testers yesterday who told me that this project is supposed to be complete in the next week, yet he couldn't even install it until this week, and virtually everything he does outside of expected process breaks.

I have yet to see a really good outsourced project.

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I think it's not the accountants but the business leaders who are to blame for this. Accountants don't make decisions, at least not any more.

About outsourced projects, when I compare it with getting work done from the team mates (as opposed to doing it yourself), I guess there are many similarities. The other team members have to be trained/oriented to the project/technology platform, domain knowledge etc. And then you need to keep a tight watch over what they are doing, so you can know in advance if they are off the mark somewhere. This is a management role, i.e. managing resources. As is the case, a PM or a TL/PL is always expected to chip in when there's a resource shortage. Soon the management starts utilizing the person as a full-fledged developer, and then he hasn't any time left to manage the team.

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I think it's not the accountants but the business leaders who are to blame for this

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I yes but the bigger the business gets the more influence the Finance Director and management accountants get, and due to share holder pressure for ever increasing returns businesses get conservative, and measures like Outsourcing which on paper look like they save you a lot of money from the bottom line become popular.

When it comes to data, I'm a control freak, I'm paranoid. I don't like not having direct control over my data. But a lot of that stems from the fact that 90% of the data that I have worked with over the last 20 years of my career has been sensitive data (from the military to Sarbanes-Oxley, to HIPPA, to banking info) ... so I tend to be hyper-sensitive about where things like that are stored. Now, if I was a pizza chain then sure no biggie, I probably wouldn't care.

Believe me, I know the advantages of cloud work and virtualization. I am also well aware of the dark side of it too.

-tg

When you have a company that size with an IT backbone you seriously should replicate to two different sites/hosts.
If that fails Murphy must be on your side...