Making the case for MultiCloud
Tired of dealing with the aftermath of another outage?
That probably means you aren’t taking advantage of a MultiCloud strategy.
And you should be.
Think about it this way. If you wanted to ensure that your office building would never lose power, it’d cost a pretty penny to run a back-up generator 24/7. But setting up offices in other cities would likely guarantee the company could still run even during an electric outage in one location.
A MultiCloud strategy is even more efficient than that. It’s inevitable that even the largest cloud providers will have down time. That’s evidenced by recent outages that affected Amazon Web Services (AWS)1 and many Netflix2 customers on Christmas Eve and Microsoft Azure3 last August. But the cloud allows us to synchronize and manage our data with several services in multiple regions, and at a fraction of the cost of using a traditional infrastructure-heavy approach.
Cloud computing manager RightScale4 has it right in a January 4 blog post on the recent outages5. Any number of issues can go wrong within a cloud; so backing up only portions of a service may not matter. An overall approach is the only guarantee.
RightScale architect Brian Adler wrote:
This AWS outage serves as a good illustration of why “best practices” are rightly so. When shortcuts are taken or oversights creep into the mix, what may appear at first blush to be a small, localized issue can potentially cascade into a bigger problem and adversely affect your infrastructure and the applications that depend on them. On the surface, individual components can appear to be distanced from those that are suffering the outage or performance degradation, but in reality they can also be potential points of failure.
The tools are out there to build highly available, resilient systems. How effectively you use these tools will dictate your tolerance to infrastructure service disruptions that will continue to occur, however infrequently.
At Ilesfay®, we support that broader strategy for the companies who need to be resilient all the time. Our ZoneSync®software allows different clouds to sit side-by-side. Using patented MatchMaking® technology to reduce bandwidth, ZoneSync® MultiCloud Replication can replicate even the largest data sets from one location to another in ‘near real-time’.
Hewlett-Packard has its own approach for battling outages, with a new guarantee of 99.95% up-time6 (topping AWS’s 99.90%) within its cloud. But that misses the overall point of a MultiCloud strategy, as the best way to improve on AWS’s 99.90% is to architect out to multiple clouds or cloud regions. For example, if you have 3 regions with 99.90% up-time, your system will be up 99.999999% of the time. Hard to beat that.
Links for story:
(1) AWS Outage Lessons Learned: If Netflix Can Suffer So Can You. RightScale Blog.
(2) A Closer Look At The Christmas Eve Outage. Netflix Tech Blog.
(3) Root Cause Analysis For Recent Windows Azure Service Interruption in Western Europe. Windows Azure Team Blog.
(5) AWS Outage Lessons Learned: If Netflix Can Suffer So Can You. RightScale Blog.
(6) What HP’s Cloud Chief Wants You To Know About HP’s Cloud. GigaOM.
Cincinnati | January 14, 2013 | Chris McLennan
