Do you trust the "Cloud"?
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In view of the catastrophic global IT mess: Do you still trust the cloud? I never have and never will.:mad: Yes, I do save some non critical data there, but is is fully backed up in local storage. I will never get in a position where cloud failures can harm me.
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
I am sure that I am not the only one that lost a backup in the cloud for being naïve enough to trust someone else's service. I know I should not have only one backup, I learned that the hard way. :laugh:
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I'm not sure how the outage/mess is related to the cloud other than the product name rhymes with cloud. :laugh: That said, I also use 'someone else's servers' in my backup strategy...encrypted of course. I still occasionally get tricked into saving Office files in OneDrive. X| Passing thought regarding the outage...last week there was a discussion about the awesomeness of PowerShell and managing enterprise systems. So why can't they write a script to rollback the update and reboot, then deploy it? :confused: Last thought...I'd hate to be on the QA team(s) that approved that update. Judas Priest - Some Heads Are Gonna Roll (Official Audio) - YouTube[^]
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse "Hope is contagious"
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In view of the catastrophic global IT mess: Do you still trust the cloud? I never have and never will.:mad: Yes, I do save some non critical data there, but is is fully backed up in local storage. I will never get in a position where cloud failures can harm me.
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
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xkcd: Dependency[^] Nothing else to add.
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Mircea Neacsu wrote:
First, let me repeat a mantra I’ve heard many years ago: “there is no frigging cloud; it’s someone’s else computer”.
That quote is completely wrong. The "Cloud" is not someone else's computer -- it's a LOT of someone else's computers, connected together in a patchwork of obviously fragile connections. It's not "a" computer, it's an entire ecosystem that is a lot more than just computers.
Mircea Neacsu wrote:
Second, from the superficial reading of news (I’m traveling now), the recent outage was not an issue with the “cloud” but with an antivirus update that went south. It affected equally physical and virtual machines, so let’s not get all worked up about the big bad “cloud”.
It doesn't matter what caused the outage, only that it happened, and that is was stupidly easy to prevent, e.g., follow good process and actually test things before putting into production. The fact that the source of the outage was a bad patch in a secondary system means we SHOULD be upset, as it demonstrates just how fragile the "Cloud" is.
BryanFazekas wrote:
The "Cloud" is not someone else's computer -- it's a LOT of someone else's computers,
Please allow me to argue that you are interacting with one single computer. It might be connected to many other computers but you are receiving data only from ONE computer at a time.
BryanFazekas wrote:
It doesn't matter what caused the outage
Again I have to disagree: it does matter. In this case it was a bad antivirus upgrade that caused computers, physical or virtual to crash. The fact that most of those computers were in "the cloud" is completely irrelevant. On your physical computer, do you update/upgrade your antivirus? My answer would be "yes". Do you expect computer to crash after such an upgrade? My answer would be "no".
BryanFazekas wrote:
it demonstrates just how fragile the "Cloud" is.
Let me reiterate that this is not a "cloud" issue. A physical computer running CloudStrike software in a room with blue painted walls would have crashed the same way. Would you blame the colour of the walls? If your answer is "no", why would you blame the fact that the computers that crashed were placed in "the cloud".
Mircea
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In view of the catastrophic global IT mess: Do you still trust the cloud? I never have and never will.:mad: Yes, I do save some non critical data there, but is is fully backed up in local storage. I will never get in a position where cloud failures can harm me.
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
I never have, and I never will. Despite the claims of Cloud fanbois, nothing is perfectly secure, and nothing ever will be, including private networks. But the latter are certainly more secure and defensible than any public platform.
Will Rogers never met me.
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In view of the catastrophic global IT mess: Do you still trust the cloud? I never have and never will.:mad: Yes, I do save some non critical data there, but is is fully backed up in local storage. I will never get in a position where cloud failures can harm me.
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
For data storage? No way. For compute resources? Possibly. However I know of several occasions where groups blew through their budget with huge compute bills from using the cloud. Nobody monitoring the usage and BAM, $30K a month down the drain. Another blew through over $100K before realizing it. Could have had some nice hardware for that.
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Absolutely not. Going back to pre cloud days (more on that in a second) say early 90s, the wife started a web site development business. At the time, none of our customers could afford their own server, and someone figured out how to create one server and sell multiple virtual servers hosted on it. Now, my wife was the html monkey while I handled the Perl and server errors, sql stuff. The more I learned about virtual servers, the more I as adamant in that we were not going to save customer information for any customer. If a website wanted to handle CC transactions, we offboarded it to some other site that I cannot remember the name. Why? 1) Sure the info goes over https. Then it goes into a mysql database on a virtual server that I have no control over. If the server owner has a bad actor, all of the sites we support were wide open. Customers did not understand this. 2) Vulnerability. If someone takes the base server down, you're down. If they hack the base server, our customers are screwed. We actually had this happen. A hacker got into the hosting company, contaminated the OS and just waited. The hosting company never detected it and after 90 days, all of the backups were corrupt. Their only option was to format the hard drives. Keep a separate backup rule learned the hard way. 3) Although Microsoft (this post, I am not picking on them specifically) gushes about how protected the Azure servers are, they run on common hardware for multiple customers, and they have been caught more than once with improper security settings allowing one customer to see other customers' data. I have no idea about the Amazon and HP environments, but if I were paranoid.... What amazes me about corporations and governments doing this is that they think they are being responsible from having a legal service agreement. We promise, they promise, etc. This is what happens when management hides behind these legal agreements. You never, ever want to have to refer to the contract except for trivial things. Cloudstrike and likely Microsoft are going to be writing a lot of checks over the next few months - if they survive. I just hope no one died. YOU DO NOT DESIGN IN A SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE FOR MISSION CRITICAL SYSTEMS.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
charlieg wrote:
YOU DO NOT DESIGN IN A SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE FOR MISSION CRITICAL SYSTEMS.
I would consider that the first rule of Systems Engineering!
Will Rogers never met me.
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charlieg wrote:
YOU DO NOT DESIGN IN A SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE FOR MISSION CRITICAL SYSTEMS.
I would consider that the first rule of Systems Engineering!
Will Rogers never met me.
you would think that. so many face palms. For those of our international community, the United States government by way of the FAA force airlines to cover passenger costs dues to travel disruptions. How this is on the airlines, only the government can come up with this. I happen to live in Atlanta where Delta Airlines is a "pillar" in the community. 80% of the flights out of the busiest airport in the world belong to Delta. You think Delta is going to eat this? I think Cloudstrike just figured out they were mission critical. Oops. And the CEO will still get his bonus. If I were at cloudstrike, I'd be cashing in my stock options last week.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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In view of the catastrophic global IT mess: Do you still trust the cloud? I never have and never will.:mad: Yes, I do save some non critical data there, but is is fully backed up in local storage. I will never get in a position where cloud failures can harm me.
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
Cp-Coder wrote:
I will never get in a position where cloud failures can harm me.
Just as long as fire, floods, earthquakes, landslides, sink holes, lightning, theft, random acts of mayhem, out of control cars, in control cars (by someone with a grudge), dementia, technology failures, etc don't impact you then you should be good.