Researcher: Interdependencies Could Lead To Cloud 'Meltdowns' 93
alphadogg writes "As the use of cloud computing becomes more and more mainstream, serious operational 'meltdowns' could arise as end-users and vendors mix, match and bundle services for various means, a researcher argues in a new paper set for discussion next week at the USENIX HotCloud '12 conference in Boston. 'As diverse, independently developed cloud services share ever more fluidly and aggressively multiplexed hardware resource pools, unpredictable interactions between load-balancing and other reactive mechanisms could lead to dynamic instabilities or "meltdowns,"' Yale University researcher and assistant computer science professor Bryan Ford wrote in the paper. Ford compared this scenario to the intertwining, complex relationships and structures that helped contribute to the global financial crisis."
Re:This is why you cloud your cloud... (Score:5, Informative)
http://archive.org/ [archive.org]
Re:The analogy the author uses doesn't work. (Score:4, Informative)
And I don't see what this has to do with the financial crisis at all.
FTFA
New cloud services may arise that essentially "resell, trade, or speculate on complex cocktails or 'derivatives' of more basic cloud resources and services, much like the modern financial and energy trading industries operate," he wrote.
Each of these various cloud components are often maintained and deployed "by a single company that, for reasons of competition, shares as few details as possible about the internal operation of its services," Ford added.
As a result, the cloud industry could find itself "yielding speculative bubbles and occasional large-scale failures, due to 'overly leveraged' composite cloud services" with weaknesses that don't become known "until the bubble bursts," Ford wrote.
The metaphor more ore less fits, except for the part that ignores how a lot of what happened during the financial crisis was outright fraud perpatrated by lenders.
The potential mess with the cloud is not about fraud, just about excessive dependancies.
Re:This is why you cloud your cloud... (Score:5, Informative)
That's one of the problems though that the researcher is flagging.
1) If a company has one instance on AWS and one on Azure and AWS fails... Azure suddenly doubles in load ( and also fails due to everybody piling on unexpectedly).
the other being:
2) Everybody uses Azure for SQL and AWS for hosting and Azure goes down... suddenly SQL dies and the AWS hosts all fail with the database down. Or the converse happens and AWS goes down and the SQL is useless without a head.
The more services you rely on the more likely that on any given day one of them will be down. If you have 99% reliability and 20 services that you depend on (without any redundancy) then your failure rate could be up to 20% since any one of the 1% failures could kill your service.
It's interesting but it seems like most of the cloud failures have been due to #1 internally so far. One sector fails and in an effort to load balance it starts taking out its peers who then also overload and take out their peers.