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  • 1.  AWS outage

    Posted 09-06-2019 09:31
    Read the comments as well.  My favorite is this:
    "Convenience of the cloud
    In the old days we all had to be constantly alert for the possibility of power loss, network outages, server failures, and other physical disasters.

    Nowadays you can pay a Cloud vendor to provide them for you."
    AWS celebrates Labor Day weekend by roasting customer data in US-East-1 BBQ
    Theregister remove preview
    AWS celebrates Labor Day weekend by roasting customer data in US-East-1 BBQ
    A power outage fried hardware within one of Amazon Web Services' data centers during America's Labor Day weekend, causing some customer data to be lost. When the power went out, and backup generators subsequently failed, some virtual server instances evaporated - and some cloud-hosted volumes were destroyed and had to be ...
    View this on Theregister >
    https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/all/2019/09/04/aws_power_outage_data_loss/


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    Phil McIntosh
    President
    Friendly Systems, Inc.
    Asheville NC
    678.273.4010 ext 5
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  • 2.  RE: AWS outage

    Posted 09-09-2019 14:29
    The scene:  A staff meeting.
    CFo continues:...It's so comforting to know we no longer have to run the back up and carry it offsite every night because...oh, what's that?  But they said they have redun...oh.  oh. oh.   Hey, do we have any of those backup drives we used to carry offsite?  You know from 2014?  Yeah, we need one now.

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    Rhonda McNamara
    Customer Success Manager
    Stewart Technologies, Inc.
    rsm@stewarttechnologies.com
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  • 3.  RE: AWS outage

    Posted 09-09-2019 15:45
    It is quite sad how much time I have spent communicating with proverbial brick walls when trying to convince business users about the need to carefully consider their backup and recovery plan.
    It is also tragic the amount of effort I've invested explaining to IT people how to have a conversation about backup and recovery strategy with business users.  Versioning, acceptable data loss, time to recover, site redundancy, offline vs online backups, monitoring / testing... sometimes it's as if common sense has disappeared from the world.
    IT person: "I can do X for $Y." << notice the lack of pros and cons with the suggestion, and no alternatives.
    The decider:  "OK, if that is what you recommend: approved."  << notice the massive amount of faith in the IT person.  No proper due diligence to manage risk.
    IT person does not have the perspective to make such business decisions alone, and the "decider" is often non-technical.
    When it hits the fan, there are questions and substantive conversations... but by then it's too late.  Overnight cloud backups are not a "one size fits all" solution, and as illustrated with this story, not all cloud platforms are created equal.  When moving online, the substance of those conversations may change... but they still need to take place.
    Backups are like insurance for your data.  Nobody wants to pay for anything more than the bare minimum... but if you end up needing it, you'll be glad you did.

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    Kevin Moyes
    Technical Systems Analyst
    Munjal White Consulting Co.
    Toronto ON
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    Original Message


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