When Lightning Strikes Your “Cloud”, Good Monitoring Means Great Disaster Recovery

Monday, July 2nd, 2012

Kablooee!  That was the sound I (and many others) heard coming from one of Amazon Web Services (aka, the "cloud") availability zones in Northern Virginia on June 30th (http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/29/amazon-outage-netflix-instagram-pinterest/, http://gigaom.com/cloud/some-of-amazon-web-services-are-down-again/).  The sound was a weather-driven event causing one of Amazon's data centers to lose power.  And what happens when a ...

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How to minimize the impacts of the next Amazon reboot .. or of your own datacenter failure

Friday, January 6th, 2012

So as everyone knows, Amazon rebooted virtually all EC2 instances in December.  They emailed people to notify them, but not everyone read the emails, leading to Amazon performing the reboots on their own schedule, with the customers unaware. For some SaaS companies, this resulted in many hours of downtime. For others, ...

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