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."
Low hanging fruit of a research piece (Score:5, Interesting)
Efficiency normally comes with economies of scale. As a partner in an outsourced vertical software company, we have hundreds of clients running in our highly tuned hosting cluster, and are able to bring economies of scale to an otherwise ridiculously expensive software niche. Yes, that means that if we have an outage, all of our clients experience an outage as well.
However, we have carefully laid plans for multiple recovery points in a disaster scenario, (Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, etc) and have maintained an uptime significantly better than our clients would typically attain if left to their own devices. We easily manage close to 4 nines of uptime in an industry where the average is realistically around 2 nines. (having "the computer is down" a day or two every year or so is typical)
Although the Internet is a "network of ends" the truth is that not all ends are created equal. Having a high quality, high speed (100 Mb), reliable (99.99%+) Internet feed in my small-ish hometown of around 80,000 people is ridiculously expensive. But in a nearby city (500,000 people 2 hours' drive) we host our servers in a tier 1 colo at 1/10th the cost of running it all ourselves, with dramatically improved reliability and network performance.
Yes, putting all your eggs in one basket means that if that basket fails, you lose all your eggs. But it also makes it easy to buy just one, really nice basket that won't break and lose your eggs.
if they actually do this - they're stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
systems needs to be compartmentalized or have redundancies built into them.
For example, I have several systems that send automated emails. I've had a problem in the past of given email servers not accepting or sending messages. It's uncommon but it happens and it's not acceptable. These are mission critical systems. They can't fail.
Solution? Redundancy up the wazoo. The way it's set up now so many things would all have to happen at the exact same moment that the only way the system is likely to fail is if we fight world war 3... and lose.
That is how you solve this problem. Don't rely on any one system. Rely on all of them. Once you figure out how to integrate one of them it's typically easier to integrate the rest. The virtues of this approach are manifest. Not just stability but if the services do processing or data retrieval you can cross reference them to find errors in databases or get a more complete data set then exists in any one source.
I mean is google or bing the best search engine? What about both at the same time?