Skip to main content

SLAs in the Cloud: Disaster-Proofing the Cloud

Good read this:

It is virtually impossible for a cloud vendor to offer a strong SLA for two reasons. First, the cost advantage of the cloud is based on shared resources, although IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) is now pushing the idea of creating and running private clouds for its large customers. But even if a cloud is private, the fact that many applications are running on a shared infrastructure increases the risk of catastrophe.

The second reason is that offering a really strong SLA, one that covers the lost revenue from an outage, is just too risky. It means putting the vendor's entire enterprise at risk, essentially selling a form of insurance on the cheap. That's why in the cloud and elsewhere, SLAs will never be that strong.

Without SLAs to provide much comfort, the real remedy to managing catastrophic outages is redundancy. If your cloud infrastructure fails for a critical system, you must be able to bring up a redundant infrastructure that performs the same functions in order to keep your business running. In this respect, the cloud is coming to its own rescue in the form of multi-cloud offerings.

RightScale has recently announced multi-cloud support for its system, which helps rapidly deploy and scale applications on cloud infrastructure. Multi-cloud support means that the configuration you use to define a one-cloud computing infrastructure, say Amazon Web Services, will not only set up a working system there, but also on Eucalyptus, Flexiscale and GoGrid as well. This provides a way out of a catastrophic failure of one of the cloud vendors. If you replicate the data stored in one cloud to another on a continuous basis, if one cloud fails, you can rapidly recreate the same infrastructure on the second cloud.

This is much better than an SLA in terms of reducing risk. As more cloud vendors expand their offerings, more and more of the cloud will become redundant. For example, Mosso, RackSpace's cloud computing division, just purchased JungleDisk, a consumer- and work group-oriented cloud storage service based on Amazon's S3. Mosso now intends to transform JungleDisk into a multi-cloud offering.


Source
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus
Post a Comment
Read more

Splunk that!

Saw this advert on Slashdot and went on to look for it and found the tour pretty neat to look at. Check out the demo too! So why would I need it? WHY NOT? I'd say. As an organization grows , new services, new data comes by, new logs start accumulating on the servers and it becomes increasingly difficult to look at all those logs, leave alone that you'd have time to read them and who cares about analysis as the time to look for those log files already makes your day, isn't it? Well a solution like this is a cool option to have your sysadmins/operators look at ONE PLACE and thus you don't have your administrators lurking around in your physical servers and *accidentally* messing up things there. Go ahead and give it a shot by downloading it and testing it. I'll give it a shot myself! Ok so I went ahead and installed it. Do this... [root@tarrydev Software]# ./splunk-Server-1.0.1-linux-installer.bin to install and this (if you screw up) [root@tarrydev Software]# /op...
Post a Comment
Read more