back to article Deploying disaster-proof apps may be easier than you think

In the wake of Google and Oracle's UK datacenter meltdowns earlier this week, many users undoubtably discovered that deploying their apps in the cloud doesn't automatically make them immune to failure. But according to an upcoming report from the Uptime Institute, building applications that can survive these kinds of cloud …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    Requirement

    The article is very reasonable and describes actionable steps companies can take, some without much in the way of added expenditures.

    But what those steps require is a team of knowledgeable employees, not consultants, who can be constrained by budget but not have a solution dictated to by on high.

  2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    Well I'll be

    So, can we finally stop hearing about how The CloudTM will save you so much money ?

    The CloudTM appears to be just as expensive, if not more, than hosting servers on your own.

    If you want to do things right, that is. Otherwise, you're obviously free to do the bare minimum and then cry a river when everything goes down.

    Because, at some point, it will.

    1. Cederic Silver badge

      Re: Well I'll be

      To host a server on my own I'd be paying higher business broadband costs alone than the entire annual cost of a resilient cloud based set up.

      So the cloud is cheaper - for my use case.

      It's more expensive for others. It's also not a company based calculation, as even for large corporations, some systems suit cloud deployment and others on-premise. Which is why hybrid is so popular.

      Reducing cloud to cost is of course also ignoring all of the other opportunities and risks involved, but even cost needs proper analysis.

    2. thondwe

      Re: Well I'll be

      Cloud costs include all the stuff you don't £££ account for locally or don't even do - land, energy, maintenance, rolling upgrades, 24x7 staffing, hot spares, security, etc etc + some profit obs

      Bit like owning a classic car vs leasing a modern one - fun doing it all yourself, but missing loads of modern benefits - air bags, crash cells, air con, etc...

  3. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    Calculating Risk

    For On-Prem, the constituent elements can arguably be determined with some basic technical knowlege.

    Trouble with The Cloud is that, to most of us, it is a homogenous porridge (if that's not a contradiction in terms), where the calculation of risk is difficult without technical representatives from The Cloud spelling it out. For that we have to rely on the accuracy of information we are fed. These reps though, are on a learning curve, so they are in the dark as much as us consumers.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Calculating Risk

      "These reps though, are on a learning curve, so they are in the dark as much as us consumers."

      That'll be their excuse.

  4. teomor

    Stateless applications

    "Stateless applications" - Bbbut, are can we really call these "applications"? :)

    1. Warm Braw

      Re: Stateless applications

      The reason deploying disaster-proof apps may be easier then you think is that you need to think about a class of applications that don't really exist.

      Actually, to be fair, there are mostly-stateless applications - like freely-available online news sites which, subject to the loss of their interactive contents, can be fairly simply resilient if you use a CDN (not really mentioned as a candidate solution) - but the moment you need to so much as authorise an access you're going to need some state somewhere and, as soon as you do, you have to have some sort of active-active model so the state replicates in real time.

  5. Mike 137 Silver badge

    Wow! What a discovery!

    "discovered that deploying their apps in the cloud doesn't automatically make them immune to failure"

    Why on Earth should it? Everything depends on the implementation, over which, in the 'cloud' you not only have zero control but also about which you have practically no information. The entire offering has to be taken on 'trust' - not real trust based on informed judgement but pseudo-trust on the basis of 'take it or leave it'. Cloud services have their legitimate uses and benefits, but it's a big mistake to assume they're intrinsically a safer alternative than on prem (unless your on prem was woeful). As the margins per client are small for cloud providers, what you get is a generic level of protection for the entire client base only. Whether that's sufficient in your given case must be determined before you commit (provided you can find out, which can be hard as they typically won't discuss detail with individual clients)

  6. Roland6 Silver badge

    "... depends entirely on how it's been deployed,"

    A necessary precursor for a business-continuity/DR deployment is for the application(s) in the stack to have been designed for this style of deployment.

  7. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "There's still a lack of clarity about who takes ownership of the resiliency issue when it comes to cloud,"

    Could this have anything to do with cloud sales weasels' pitches?

  8. John 104

    An analysis of these tools showed that achieving high degrees of resiliency was a relatively straightforward prospect – especially when the cost of lost business and cloud SLAs were taken into consideration.

    HAHA. What a joke. Does anyone honestly think that when given the option to spend an appropriate amount on BCP vs saving the money that the average business will spend for BCP? Time and again businesses have proven that they'd rather go on the cheap. Never mind the cost of lost business revenue during the outage.

    As for the resiliency, the only way to really achieve that via the cloud is to use multiple providers. Anyone who is paying attention knows that despite the best efforts of engineers, mistakes have happened that take down entire platforms. Regional redundancy won't help there...

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