When things go wrong
In technology, as in so much else, things go wrong all the time. Web sites go down, companies lose your data, and more. We all know this and – to greater or lesser degrees – broadly accept that it will eventually happen to us. The real trick, often, isn’t to prevent everything going wrong but to […]
Ooma Phone Service Goes Down, So Does the Website. Company Sleeps Through It.
The one thing a phone service can’t do is to simply disappear. And it is normally those times we realize how much of a lifeline it still is. Like I did, expecting a call from my Dad’s cardiologist re. his hospitalization. Waiting, waiting, I was getting p***d with the poor doc, when I noticed the […]
Cloud Outages: Design For Failure Or Enterprise Clouds?
Last weekend saw Lightning taking out datacenters associated with Amazon Cloud and Microsoft BPOS. It affected one Availability Zone (AZ) in AWS Europe. Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge has detailed information on the incident. Amazon said that lightning struck a transformer near its data center, causing an explosion and fire that knocked out utility […]
Plane Simple
It’s amazing, though not in the least bit surprising, that the recent AWS outage has generated such widespread attention, with a plethora of blog posts from customers to industry experts taking up pixel space across all corners of the globe. I think it’s fairly obvious to all that since the event, everything that needs to […]
Some Lessons From AWS Outage
Yesterday’s AWS outage has been buzzing around the tech blogosphere even after 24+ hours. As usual naysayers of cloud are up in the arms trying not to miss the golden opportunity to create FUD and competitors to Amazon are tapping into their misery to push their services. Well, people are tuned to accept this as […]
Cloud Computing Does Not Absolve a Company of Good Disaster Planning
Yes the data blowout at Microsoft’s Danger data center should have everyone taking a short sharp look at the way that they do data recovery and disaster preparedness. The problem is not so much the outage but the data loss, data loss caused because the backups didn’t work. This is not a cloud computing issue […]
The Web May Not Equal the Cloud But Does Anyone Care?
Over on the salesforce.com blog, Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Research at salesforce posted in light of the recent problems suffered by Gmail users. Coffee points out correctly that Gmail did not, in fact, go down. Rather users of the web application were unable to access their accounts. As Coffe said; Gmail did not go […]
Dear Google: Act Like A Cloud
Last week Google had an outage that made pundits talk about unreliability of the cloud (again). I have written several times in this blog about how stupid it is to blame cloud computing for such outages. Most recently, Dan Morrill wrote a post arguing the same. There are some people in the clouderati who had […]
One Swallow Doth Not a Summer Make
Before any wit comes up with any other suggestions for the meaning of the title of this post, the “swallow” in the above refers to the bird, Stelgidopteryx serripennis, and not the physiological movement, phagia. For one swallow does not make the summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short […]
Nature's Attack On Amazon And The Instance Vs Fabric Debate
Image via Wikipedia Last week, a lightning strike rendered part of Amazon EC2 belonging to a single zone cutoff from the real world. I don’t want to go into whether it is an outage or not debate but towards a different kind of debate. Ever since Cloud Computing started gaining traction, we have a debate […]
Gmail Outage and the Benefit of Synchronization (or Backup)
Gmail appears to have another outage today. While reports of the outage surfaced on Twitter hours ago, Google’s status board indicated all was OK, until about 15 minutes ago, when this update appeared: 2:16pm: We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access […]
Left In The Dark!
Last Tuesday a ‘perfect storm’ in the form of a double fibre cable fault in Western and Central Australia left almost the entire top end of the country without telephone, internet or mobile communications for about 10 hours. That pretty much amounts to ZERO communications in this day in age. I woke to find out […]
Gmail Outage and Media Irresponsibility
Image via CrunchBase After the recent Gmail outage for several hours, internet is filled with uproar over the downtime and, as expected, the fear mongers with special interests in the failure of Cloud Computing are using the opportunity to whip up confusion in the minds of users. Wow, it appeared more like the opportunistic hyenas […]
LinkedIn’s Revenge: TechCrunch Down
If you blog, or have any sort of web presence, your visitor log is an amazing source of information, you just have to know how to use it. Sometimes I discover news based on the keyword searches that lead to my blog. This morning I knew LinkedIn was in trouble when I saw significant traffic […]
One Bad Experience Doesn't Tarnish the Entire Industry
I hate it when people use a discrete example to cast doubt over an entire industry.We see it every time Gmail has an outage. We see it every time there’s a Salesforce outage. It’s unhelpful and it’s just plain wrong. The latest example came this morning – commenting on the SageLive issues, Kevin White from […]
