CloudFucius Counts: Cloud Outages | GovIT Conference Expo 2009

CloudFucius Counts: Cloud Outages

Well, maybe CloudFucius doesn’t but a couple websites do

Aug. 12, 2010 04:00 PM

Well, maybe CloudFucius doesn’t but a couple websites do. Matching the same uptime guarantees that you have with your physical infrastructure can be hard to accomplish. While some companies, mostly smaller enterprises, have put all their systems in the cloud, most deployments are ‘extensions’ of existing infrastructures to provide fault tolerance, disaster recovery and all the other situations where the cloud is advantageous. We all know that the Internet, in and of itself, can have good days and bad – but we somewhat expect this from time to time. We understand that there are innumerable events that can drastically effect the internet and most of those are out of our control. While it may irritate us that we can’t get to our favorite website or work application, we generally move on to the next or wait a few minutes and try again. However, patience and understanding are usually not the headlines used when describing an IT admin when critical business systems are unavailable.

Uptime can also be a nebulous thing – connection is available but the servers are down; servers up but fiber cut; site available but database/authentication/search or other functionality are unavailable. We hope that the provider has redundancy and other measures to ensure systems, infrastructure and data centers are available. We’ve expected this for all the years we’ve put servers in co-lo facilities and hosting data centers and should ask the same ‘availability’ questions of our cloud providers that we’ve demanded from our raised floor vendors.

Now there are a couple websites where you can check things like cloud outages and cloud security incidents. CloudFail.net is a site that monitors service updates from the leading cloud vendors and aggregates those feeds into a simple blog format. It allows you to ‘keep an eye’ on cloud providers and get compiled information regarding outages. An August 11th entry shows the entire thread of a Google Mail issue, tracking it from the initial 4:10am occurrence to the final resolution alert at 2:48pm. Cloutage.org is an Open Security Foundation project that documents known and reported incidents with cloud services along with providing current news on cloud security. They provide a couple charts right from the main page showing the latest Cloud Incidents (outage, dataloss, etc) along with the latest Media Reports surrounding cloud security. These sites should help cloud prospects along with cloud users stay informed about what happening in the haze.

And one from Confucius: Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes.

The CloudFucius Series: Intro, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

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twitter: @psilvas

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About Peter Silva
Peter Silva covers security for F5’s Technical Marketing Team. After working in Professional Theatre for 10 years, Peter decided to change careers. Starting out with a small VAR selling Netopia routers and the Instant Internet box, he soon became one of the first six Internet Specialists for AT&T managing customers on the original ATT WorldNet network.

Now having his Telco background he moved to Verio to focus on access, IP security along with web hosting. After losing a deal to Exodus Communications (now Savvis) for technical reasons, the customer still wanted Peter as their local SE contact so Exodus made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. As only the third person hired in the Midwest, he helped Exodus grow from an executive suite to two enormous datacenters in the Chicago land area working with such customers as Ticketmaster, Rolling Stone, uBid, Orbitz, Best Buy and others.

Bringing the slightly theatrical and fairly technical together, he covers training, writing, speaking, along with overall product direction and evangelism for F5’s security line. Prior to joining F5, he was the Business Development Manager with Pacific Wireless Communications. He’s also been in such plays as The Glass Menagerie, All’s Well That Ends Well, Cinderella and others. He earned his B.S. from Marquette University, and is a certified instructor in the Wisconsin System of Vocational, Technical & Adult Education.