How to Survive a Cloud Outage
by Ray on 18/10/12 at 7:35 pm
A cloud outage can effect many entities, including enterprise-level companies. Having said that, there are still many businesses that rely on the cloud. With the pay as you go pricing structure and flexible options to choose from, the cloud services many customer related needs.
Even if just a minor glitch occurs with a cloud hosting provider, this can be a huge catastrophe for those relying on its services. If high visibility companies go down because of an outage, the situation can become extremely complicated, and can result in loss of many potential clients for the business. Nuvem Analytics monitors many accounts, including several which went down in 2011 due to the outage. By monitoring these customers, they reported that about 35% of the beta partners are highly vulnerable to an outage, due to their link to the cloud.
This does not have to be the case; you don’t have to be a tech guru to figure out how to protect your cloud. This list is going to provide you with 5 things you must do, to protect your cloud from future outages and issues.
1. Keeping up with your EBSs (Elastic Block Store) and maintaining snapshots of them is also critical. If an outage damages the EBS, you can simply create a new one via a snapshot. And, if the EBS remains down for longer periods of time in a given snapshot, users can use a provisional snapshot from a different availability zone, since snapshots are only tied to the region (not the availability zone). So, if one is unavailable, you can restore it from a different snapshot in another availability zone.
2. It is important to keep cloud data file copies in hand, and to keep offsite file copies available as well. A third party service is a good option for data backups.
3. Use multiple availability zones while elastic load balancing is in place. By balancing the incoming traffic, the system becomes more stable. And, by using this through multiple zone layers, you can further enhance the tolerance levels in your system. So, even if one zone goes down, you have other ELB zones up and running in the infrastructure.
4. You must watch out for unhealthy instances with your ELB. Due to the fact that the unhealthy instances do not receive traffic, even if other healthy ones are up and running, this can interfere with operations in the infrastructure.
5. Using external monitoring systems and tools is also imperative. Although AWS Cloudwatch is a great service, the levels of interdependence aren’t clear – this means that in the event of an outage, the services might not be available. So considering an external monitoring system to alert you of outages would be a great idea.
These are important tips to help you cope with a cloud outage, but they are only a starting point for protection. Following these tips will not guarantee that your cloud system is going to run properly during an outage, but it should definitely help.
About The Author: Ray is a freelance writer who enjoys writing about cloud technology and its impact on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). You can find more of his work on his website about ERP Vendors.
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