Rackspace Outage: One Swallow Doth Not a Summer Make


Written by Phil on July 24, 2009 in Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery.

With apologies to Aristotle who, if his long robes were to allow him, would be spinning in his grave at my use of his words but it seemed like an (almost) appropriate quote to discuss the crescendo of the naysayers claiming the recent outages suffered by hosting/cloud vendors indicate how flawed a move to the cloud really is. One (or for that matter half a dozen) outages) doth not a concept negate.

At the end of the day, looking at recent outages , some guidelines can be drawn about how to avoid these incidents and how to react to them if and when they occur;

  • Plan ad nauseum – multiple levels of redundancy are critical. Assess the worse case scenario and then plan for something even worse. Test your ability to switch to alternative locations quickly and cleanly.
  • Communicate ad nauseum – social media is cheap and easy – use it. Develop a service notification dashboard and publicize it- both within the offering and at an alternative location (company blog hosted elsewhere for example). Post status updates to Twitter in the event of an outage.
  • Test disaster recovery protocols. A data centre outage is one thing, the ability to restore backups, to quickly run consistency checks and to get users up and running with no data loss is critical.
  • Hosting/Cloud vendors react fast and react well – witness Rackspace’s quick response with credits after their outage – sure their SLAs required this but I’d like to think it would have happened anyway

See One Swallow Doth Not a Summer Make by Ben Kepes

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