A quick note, following from news of Google Compute outage yesterday, and outages caused by DNS changes at Amazon S3 slightly more than a week ago, it’s important to remember that moving to the cloud still requires operations (sysadmin, devops, whatever we want to call it).
There is a belief that moving to the public cloud allows companies to outsource most, if not all of their operations staff. But there is a very real danger in abrogation of ops responsibility.
If you are outsourced to the cloud, do you have a disaster recovery plan? What happens if the systems that are ‘too big to fail’ do just that?
I’m not saying the cloud is bad — it enables companies to go to the web with next to no capex investment. But that doesn’t mean it is the end all be all, and if you’re not taking care of operations in-house, it’s very likely that you will regret it.
Here’s some further interesting reading: TechTarget Cloud outage report 2014.