Islander

Islander

A celestial event brought the light of knowledge of cloud and lit up many a user with a simple answer to the question "Where is my data?". In Ireland and once gone.
At least that is the lightning that struck a transformer in Ireland - for IT professionals from Amazon out of the blue - some clarification, because it shows how it is to promise just ordered the high availability in the cloud. A single thick cloud computing can provide the nearly impossible task and make a flash something unpredictable, in this case with implications for Amazon, which does not mean that others are immune. Ever since the disaster it creates AWS (Amazon Web Service) stops on its own to restore just the memory areas to conserve in which its clients the data they need when they want to count on the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): the volumes in Elastic Block Storage (EBS).
"Amazon EBS volumes are designed to be highly available and reliable. Amazon EBS volume data is replicated across multiple servers in to Availability Zone. "
Highly available and reliable availability in the area - a remarkable loop. In order to keep data highly available, it requires additional memory and distributed backup mechanisms - mainly distributed over several sites. This was but the beginning and the cloud, one might think. Unfortunately, in many cases, because once there are legal provisions, the data bind to specific regions. On the other cloud providers can not operate dozens of malls, after all, it is to cope with significant volumes. And data transport is expensive, especially given the astronomically growing quantities. Distribute to customers across continents expects several terabytes, not themselves.
Anyone who wants to penetrate the layers of cloud can ultimately end up only in certain places. Amazon operates around five large clusters: two in the U.S., two in Asia and one in the EMEA region - in Ireland.
Hit. Pick up in the bunker and the backups. Unfortunately, it stumbles now considerable misunderstanding. To save snapshots, the only method at Amazon, the status of an EBS volume to meet the purpose just as little as copies distributed in the cloud. The data users are ultimately human, which means they change. The one stored somewhere else, the other deleted on purpose, and nothing quite like snapshots or restore copies of one hundred percent: pointer into a void and show records with the same name but with different content appear more than once.
The Internet and so the cloud is a probability space. An availability of 99.95% of the house, Amazon may mean just that 43.8 hours of network failure in 10 years yield a mathematically high availability, which does not arouse confidence, if it just happened.
One should however not forget: As soon as that Amazon EC2 was better in summer 2006, has plunged itler heaps on the service in beta to intercept power peaks. High availability was not asked, was there to provide additional resources as needed temporarily. The beta is gone, but it should do what clouds are concerned, remain in the minds of the time being. It must not lead to raising a young technology in the sky before it is clear how it looks on the ground. Sometimes one can even teach a hungry squirrel of a better cable, such as Spiegel Online reported.