Voice of the DBA

Tag: Cloud Computing

  • The Titanic Cloud

    Nothing is Unsinkable

    Is a cloud provider unsinkable? This piece from CNN shows an image of the Titanic as it talks about Amazon’s recent Amazon Web Services outage, which took down parts of many sites, including Reddit, FourSquare and the New York Times.

    While I think Amazon has done an amazing job of building technology well, they are no different than any large provider. Google has had issues with their services and Hotmail recently had a failure that lost data for some people. Salesforce.com has gone down and Oracle’s “unbreakable” moniker has proven to be untrue, and the unsinkable Titanic wasn’t the first large endeavor to fail.

    What’s interesting to me is that AWS wasn’t down for me. I didn’t use any of the services mentioned at the time of the outage, so as far as I was concerned, nothing happened. That’s the luck of the draw and as we move to a more connected world, with our systems reaching people all across the globe, we have a large variety of customers who will never notice our issue. The flip side is that it’s more likely at least someone will notice any of our issues.

    There isn’t a foolproof way to build a computer system that runs 100% of the time. As much as every large provider in the “cloud” will try to convince you otherwise, there will be issues. If the cloud is right for you, and fits your business, make sure that you have good backup plans in place, consider architecting your systems to work across different providers, and ensure that you always, always, always have good backups.

    More than ever I think this mantra applies to people managing data in the cloud: good backup, good resume. You need one of them.

    Steve Jones

  • Cascading Human Error

    One mistake could cascade

    I caught this short piece on the Amazon EC2 outageand while it does highlight a potential problem in the world of the cloud, there was one part of it that really stuck out to me. This quote in particular was one that has me worried about the future: “It’s the kind of error an operator could makes as a wrong choice on a menu or the entry of the name of the last network worked on instead of the one needed. In short, it was a human error that’s all too likely to occur with anyone momentarily preoccupied with the price of mangoes or a flare up with a spouse. “ That’s a little scary, and while it’s not necessarily a reason to avoid the cloud, it is potentially a reason to avoid the extremely large companies like Amazon and Microsoft. They have built these large infrastructures, using lots of standardization and hopefully, automation. In the places where humans do have to type commands or make configuration changes, it’s possible that they make a mistake. While that can happen in any size company, when it happens for Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, a large number of people can be affected. In many ways I think we have a problem with extremely large, standardized, and highly dependent infrastructures. While being able to deploy a configuration change to a 1,000 servers at once or reboot 800 for a patch is cool, it’s also potentially a problem. We used to manage nearly 1,000 Windows servers and patch the large majority at one time with SMS, but we also held our collective breaths whenever hundreds of them rebooted at once. One mistake, and it makes for a very long night. And a very long day when you are explaining the issues to management. I don’t think we will ever eliminate human error, but we can definitely minimize it. Strong QA processes should require automated deployments and ensure the exact same deployment run on QA is run in production. If we can stick to that type of process, regardless of the delays it might create, we can minimize lots of human error. Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • The Intelligence Cloud

    The Air Force Academy Chapel

    I was thinking to call this the “Military Intelligence Cloud” but no one would believe it was true. Apparently the US Air Force has awarded a contract to build an intelligence platform that will allow different branches of the military and agencies to share data. And, by the way, they will be building a cloud based system.

    I’m not sure why the “cloud” is such a buzzword and why everyone thinks it results in cost savings. Supposedly a “private cloud” based system is being used for cost reasons, and because the public cloud services like Windows Azure and Amazon’s EC2 might not be secure enough.

    However what is a private cloud here? Isn’t it just an outsourced set of systems hosted elsewhere? It seems as though many companies and journalists are selling the cloud as some sort of new technology? Isn’t it just a set of hosted servers that are just virtual machines? Or is it just a set of servers that are standardized somehow in their configuration and capabilities?

    It seems that all the press, and all the commercials from Microsoft might be working, and the collective managerial sheep herd is flocking to the cloud as some amazing new change in the way their systems will work. If that’s the case, I’m not sure this new cloud service will be any more intelligent a move than and other outsourcing decision.

    I think there is promise in a more abstract, more ephemeral type of platform in the cloud, but it seems as thought we might be a long way from actually implementing something like that.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • PAAS

    Will we get a real platform in the clouds or just virtual machines?

    When I hear people talk about the “cloud” I often find that I have a different view of what “cloud” means.  What is a cloud? How is it structured? There are all sorts of definitions, but in my mind I have thought of the cloud as a service I can use, just as I use the web. My browser works with any kind of hardware, and software, as long as it handles the http spec.

    In my mind, that’s what I expect with a cloud database service. It conforms to what I expect in a SQL Server database, allowing me to deploy my data and objects, and expecting that I don’t need to worry about a database name, or configuring Windows logins, or even worrying about scaling up from 4 to 8 CPUs. I’d expect that the cloud would handle this fairly invisibly.

    There’s an acronym called PAAS, which is Platform as a Service, and it’s analogous to SAAS (Software as a service) and IAAS (infrastructure as a service). The idea is that an application platform exists in the cloud and you essentially upload your code, allowing the provisioning, scaling, and other details to be handled by the platform is interesting. This article talks about PASS solving lots of developers’ problems, but I think it’ s a little premature to think that this is the best solution for many types of businesses.

    I do hope that we find a way to smooth the deployment and access for our applications and services for both companies and consumers. It does feel that we spend a lot of time covering up for the inefficiencies in our entire application development and deployment life cycle. The cloud has some promise here, but it has to be more than a Windows host that runs on someone else’s hardware. It has to truly handle much of the complexity and abstract  us away from those details, in a secure, safe way.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts