January 8, 2015 at 7:42 am
The good news is that Verizon cloud services isn't very popular, so the outage should impact only a small percentage of it's customers. 🙂
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
January 8, 2015 at 8:14 am
Eric M Russell (1/8/2015)
The good news is that Verizon cloud services isn't very popular, so the outage should impact only a small percentage of it's customers. 🙂
I did read that this is not there Enterprise Cloud services. This is the new Verizon Cloud service that was in Beta until late 2014. Not certain that this service was ever advertised as "always on" or "available everywhere".
This completely changes my attitude.
If you pay for something that has a cloud label that you know is not really "cloud" then you can expect these things.
January 8, 2015 at 8:22 am
I've never been a fan of clouds, too many news stories like this one talking about outages: botched upgrades, misconfigurations, etc. At least this time Verizon is announcing it in advance, even if it's taking a weirdly-long amount of time to do.
Yet I use clouds for trivial stuff, mainly syncing a small number of files between my desktop, laptop, phone, and tablet. I appreciate the convenience, yet I'm always mindful of the high school coach who had all of his school's sports videos loaded on Mega Upload and he lost everything when the Feds took it down. Likewise there were the stories of poor configuration of Amazon's cloud that made it really easy to access the admin interface of other people's configurations and do horrible things.
It's a two-edged sword, convenience and risk, and I won't store critical data on one. That's what off-site physical backups that remain under my control are for.
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
January 8, 2015 at 9:20 am
All my major and recurring headaches are caused by hosted providers. Our operations run 24/7 and so do my datacenters. Maintenance can not take our in house systems down. But my cloud vendors are taking me down all the time. Sure it is normally for 2 hours and not 2 days but why do they get to shutdown when I can't. They obviously have way more resources than my 5 man team does.
This is the worst I have heard of but this type of thing is why I still have my own SQL and Web Farms and I host my own E-mail. There is nothing worse than having to tell users the issue is out of our control but we have a support case open.
January 8, 2015 at 9:29 am
The thing is more and more people and companies are embracing 'the cloud'. I don't like it for the obvious security reasons, no control over who behind the scenes could be accessing data, disaster recovery, internet connectivity, etc....
There is more and more talk here about some apps going to the cloud. The other thing that is concerning is that the more thing go to the cloud the less and less the company needs a multi person DBA staff. Will we wake up in 15 years and all DBA and server engineers be employed by service providers and not by the specific companies?
January 8, 2015 at 9:35 am
I like the cloud as a redundant backup. There is still a place for something I can use reliably once a week if the pricing makes sense.
It sure does help the case of an open cloud, where I can move my processes to whomever thinks they will be up that day with the least amount of friction.
January 8, 2015 at 9:48 am
Somebody made a bad decision for their career. Who's their CIO? I wonder what's happening to their stock? It's a decision so inconsistent with their brand message that you would think someone might be fired just for suggesting it. Wow. What a magnificent display of incompetence.
January 8, 2015 at 10:25 am
lshanahan (1/8/2015)
First: Ouch.Second: I'm trying to wrap my head around what kind of maintenance could possibly require a 48-hour downtime, and even then, there's no high availability architecture in place?
I'm certain they're not expecting it to take that long, but still...
My guess they have some fundamental issue in their architecture, or it's a wholesale swap of something like all routers. Probably won't be 48 hours, might be < 24, but they padded in case they are calling support to deal with issues.
January 8, 2015 at 10:27 am
Wayne West (1/8/2015)
I've never been a fan of clouds, too many news stories like this one talking about outages: botched upgrades, misconfigurations, etc. At least this time Verizon is announcing it in advance, even if it's taking a weirdly-long amount of time to do.Yet I use clouds for trivial stuff, mainly syncing a small number of files between my desktop, laptop, phone, and tablet. I appreciate the convenience, yet I'm always mindful of the high school coach who had all of his school's sports videos loaded on Mega Upload and he lost everything when the Feds took it down. Likewise there were the stories of poor configuration of Amazon's cloud that made it really easy to access the admin interface of other people's configurations and do horrible things.
It's a two-edged sword, convenience and risk, and I won't store critical data on one. That's what off-site physical backups that remain under my control are for.
I'm torn here. The fact that things are on the cloud does not alleviate the need for backups. Even the Azure, 3 copies kept, process doesn't alleviate the need for you to control a backup.
However, this isn't far off what I've seen happen in companies. They have been down for two days at times because of poor administration on their part.
The cloud isn't a panacea, nor is it useless for critical data. You have to use it for what it is.
January 8, 2015 at 10:28 am
Steve you are most likely correct. However, if they expect to host companies live production data in the future they have to have an alternate plan to fail over or have many very small outages somehow.
January 8, 2015 at 10:47 am
If it's not enterprise applications what are affected, then perhaps it's not that big of a deal. However, it does break my heart to think of all those millions of Americans who won't have access to their archived tweets and selfies for an entire weekend.
:rolleyes:
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
January 8, 2015 at 11:14 am
The last place I worked we had implemented Microsoft's Office 365 cloud based solution. By the time I had departed a few months later, it was being referred to as 'Office 361' due to the outages and declining. It was almost universally despised in less than 6 months.
January 8, 2015 at 2:03 pm
eric.notheisen (1/8/2015)
I have had concerns about storage as a service for some time. I remember doing technical sales of Microsoft CRM against SalesForce.com years ago. My primary selling point from a technical standpoint was someone else owned your data. This 48 hour downtime is a classic example of the problems I foresaw then. How many small businesses using Verizon's cloud will lose sales because of this scheduled down time? Verizon's scheduled downtime is just the tip of the iceberg; it shows you cannot trust third party vendors with your data. The hack of Apple's cloud is an additional point of reference to the disaster we call the cloud.Hardware is no longer as expensive as it once was. Much of the necessary software is readily available either as open source or through Microsoft or Oracle. Value Added Resellers (VARs) offer consulting services that ameliorate the cost of full time support resources. Enterprise organizations should make the investment in the hardware and software they need to maintain their data independently.
I agree strongly with all that.
There is also another issue with the cloud. Quite apart from outages like this and security issues, the differences in various national regulations about data and the attitude of most cloud providers that they will do whatever the American courts/government tells them regardless of what legal regime applies to the data makes it difficult for a company outside the USA use the cloud for anything but trivia.
Tom
January 8, 2015 at 5:16 pm
Well, I think we just proved cloud service is NOT 'always on', regardless of the claims.
I personally would NEVER have committed my company's data to off-site or remote servers. It was bad enough just having serves that connected regularly to our central location. At least we knew we had a good copy of our data, we knew we had our backups, and we knew we had off-site backup storage also. Didn't depend on someone else's selection of personnel, someone else's maintenance, some else's communications capability. And we had capable DBA's who could recover servers and DB's quickly. And if we didn't or couldn't, we had to answer for it.
On the other hand, we continually explained, to no avail', that we could not and should not promise continuous service or '99.999 % uptime'. However, management being management, they still promised and expected miracles. And occasionally, we did manage a few miracles for them.
Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )
January 8, 2015 at 5:25 pm
I for one would really like to know more about the reasons behind the outage. There was a Xen security advisory last September that caused huge ripples across several cloud services in cluding Amazon EC2 and Rackspace. Considering that this service exited beta around the same time I'm wondering if that's what we're seeing here and Verizon is only now getting around to patching a major vulnerability. More here:
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