4 Important Tips On How Companies Can Prepare For Cloud Outages

Cloud hosting and cloud computing is all the buzz these days. But after the outages Amazon faced a couple months ago, everyone is interested in how businesses can prevent possible cloud outages. The latest Amazon EC2 outage was the worst in cloud computing's history. It made the front page of many news pages, including the New York Times, probably because many people were shocked by how many web sites and services actually rely on EC2. We all knew cloud computing was growing in pupolarity but untill now most of us didn't realise how widespread cloud computing has become. One lesson that we all learnt is that companies need to know more about how to design their cloud application infrastructures to handle failures on their cloud provider's end.

The tips below are compiled by Stan Klimoff, Director of Cloud Services for Grid Dynamics. 

How Companies can prepare for Cloud Outages:

1. Institute disaster drills. This gives a good understanding of the weak points of the system, as well as prepares the staff to face a real disaster.
2. Design for failure. Follow the rule that everything that can fail, will fail. This will help your team better prepare for possible outages. Designing for failure is an expensive engineering practice, but it definitely pays off in the end.
3. Have a "Plan B". You have to be able to take your stuff and move away from an ISP within hours. Design your system to avoid vendor lock-ins.
4. Know your Service Level Agreements. The recent cloud outage that Amazon experienced was actually caused by the EBS (Elastic Block Store) service, which has the stated availability on par with the one of a local disk. No one should trust a single local disk with a critical database.

Grid Dynamics, the authority on cloud computing and enterprise systems scalability, helps companies achieve better performance, higher availability, faster time-to-market and lower operational costs by scaling mission-critical systems. Using the latest advancements in grid and cloud computing technologies, the company helps customers turn monolithic applications into scalable services; and static, underutilized server clusters into virtualized compute clouds. www.griddynamics.com