Netflix

Virtual Block Storage Crashed Your Cloud Again :(

You know it's bad when you start writing an incident report with the words "The first 12 hours." You know you need a stiff drink, possibly a career change, when you follow that up with phrases like "this was going to be a lengthy outage...", "the next 48 hours...", and "as much as 3 days".

That's what happened to huge companies like NetFlix, Heroku, Reddit,Hootsuite, Foursquare, Quora, and Imgur the week of April 21, 2011. Amazon AWS went down for over 80 hours, leaving them and others up a creek without a paddle. The root cause of this cloud-tastrify echoed loud and clear. Heroku said:

Wrangling Elephants in the Cloud

You know the elephant in the room, the one no one wants to talk about. Well it turns out there was a whole herd of them hiding in my cloud. There's a herd of them hiding in your cloud too. I'm sure of it. Here is my story and how I learned to wrangle the elephants in the cloud.

Like many of you, my boss walked into my office about three years ago and said "We need to move everything to the cloud." At the time, I wasn't convinced that moving to the cloud had technical merit. The business, on the other hand, had decided that, for whatever reason, it was absolutely necessary.

As I began planning the move, selecting a cloud provider, picking tools with which to manage the deployment, I knew that I wasn't going to be able to provide the same quality of service in a cloud as I had in our server farm. There were too many unknowns.

The Ball is in the Net. Goal or No Goal?

The ball hit the net but from which side. Can you tell? Over the past three years, companies have pushed themselves to the cloud for many reasons but have they landed in the wrong side of the net?

Many companies have mistaken moving to the cloud for a goal to be achieved and it is natural to make that mistake. Companies see the bottom line, that building services in PAAS or IAAS clouds lowers the costs of bootstrapping risky projects, speeds up time to market and enables greater flexibility. They naturally make moving everything to the cloud a business target.

They miss that driving these benefits are the ways that automation and infrastructure as a service force the modernization and industrialization of a company's IT teams and processes. Even if a company isn't using any modern software driven deployment techniques, it is the industrialization of infrastructure on the provider's side that allows a "machine" to be spec'ed, purchased, racked, cabled, and installed at the push of a button or the call of an API. It is this change in the way that IT works that is improving the bottom line, speeding time to market and increasing the business agility.