Cloud technology is hard to build. Even if you’re a company with all the cloud experience of Amazon.com (probably one of the two biggest brain trusts on the planet for cloud implementation), making it all work can be a challenge.
Yesterday, the Register reported that about 0.07 per cent of Amazon’s lost EBS storage volumes in the East Region of its infrastructure cloud are not fully recoverable.
In other words, some data is permanently lost.
This, of course, is in reference to Amazon’s devastating cloud failure last week.
See also: Seven lessons to learn from Amazon’s outage
See also: Amazon Web Services outage: ‘Detailed post mortem’ coming
If there’s any one company you would think you could trust with your data, it’d be Amazon. Even more than Google — who’s likely to hold your data, and then subject it to some sort of inhuman scrutiny, trying to extract the unified field theory, the meaning of life, and what your favorite breakfast cereal is from the data stored in your online documents — Amazon has always seemed to be the most trusted keeper of the sacred cloud.
But those who fly too high are apparently destined to fall to Earth, and Amazon’s cloud hid within it not just a silver lining, but bolts of lightning.
[It's at this point that your esteemed author must apologize for the metaphors he's mauling. As you all know by now, he can't help himself. Now back to our story.]
While Amazon’s customers are undoubtedly disturbed by the existence (actually, lack thereof) of unrecoverable data, there are important lessons to be learned here, both for private sector customers and — especially — government customers moving increasingly to the cloud.
See also: Clouds, consolidation, culture: making federal IT less ‘horrible’
See also: Why killing Data.gov is wrong-headed and stupid
See also: Senate committee stifles White House cloud computing caper
Lesson 1: Don’t trust any single vendor
It has always astonished me that people trust their data to the cloud. As a guy who’s operated my own mail server since before there were combustion engines, it’s never seemed quite right that consumers and businesses would put all their critical information into someone else’s hands.
I know it’s a pain to manage it all yourself, and I know free seems like such a good price, but if you’ve been around the block more than just a few times, you’ll realize that even some of the most promising companies can fail (or change their behavior).
If you care about your data (and you should, you really, really should), then make sure that you don’t rely on just one vendor. That vendor could go out of business, be acquired by a competitor, or just turn into a complete and total a-hole.
Lesson 2: Always back-up your data
I know this should be obvious, but it’s apparently not. I can’t tell you how many whining babies I’ve encountered over the years who were too stupid or too lazy to back their stuff up.
Which brings me to…
