Leveraging the cloud has been the hot ticket over the last 5 years and with companies looking to cut cost, it seemed to be the logical choice. Like with most things, it isn’t always about the product, but how you implement or install the product that really matters. As surprising as the outage may have been for some, there are tools built right into AWS to prevent your business from being affected. It’s about knowing what those tools are and how to implement them. I can only imagine the look on the sysadmins face when they noticed their systems were not accessible, only to remember those systems are running on AWS - the service that was supposed to quiet those system outage nightmares.
How is this possible?!
We have to remind ourselves of Murphy’s Law and that even the most bulletproof systems are vulnerable, so it’s best to have a contingency plan in place for when such an event occurs. The signs were all there. In June 2016 a superstorm rolled over Sydney, Australia taking offline the AWS availability zone in that region. Things happen: unplanned events, mother nature, an engineer hits save on the wrong script file. All these variables are in play, still, companies take their critical systems, place them in the cloud and like a rotisserie chicken, “set it and forget it”.
The aftermath
A flurry of chatter hit social media shortly after the event, with people shaming AWS as if there was no fault of their own. Did they choose the wrong cloud provider? Is Microsoft’s Azure Blob Storage or Google’s Cloud Storage a more reliable platform? I believe that any of these providers could have experienced the same fate and that this is a reminder that the cloud isn’t the final answer to all our technology woes. What it is, however, is a tool to use to ensure continuity within your organization's infrastructure, a tool that has loads of built-in features to help prevent an event like this from affecting your organization. Though a proper roadmap needs to be in place and with the right guidance it’s not an impossible feat.
Conclusion
We need to better understand the cloud and more specifically AWS as it has much more to offer than most are aware of. You need the right team to help you understand those features and give you guidance so you can make the right choice for your business. Those choices can be a full cloud deployment with multi-regions or a single region hybrid solution. Maybe it’s a hybrid, multi-region, multi-vendor solution that makes the most business sense for your organization. Either way, having the right AWS Solutions Partner is the first step to having a successful cloud deployment.
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