Twitter Dies Under DDoS Attack, What’s Next for the Cloud?
Aug/090
If your mission critical apps were part of Twitter’s cloud today, you would’ve been SOL for a few hours while the Tweetsters sorted out a Denial of Service attack that took the system down. Mashable reports that Facebook was also affected. But the news is not that Twitter was down, Twitter actually goes down all the time, just not for hours. At least not recently.
So if your business were running on the Tweet-Cloud (I know it doesn’t exist, I’m just making a reference) and your ecommerce transactions depended on the 99.999 uptime on the brochure, your two hours of dark, in the middle of the US morning, could be quite expensive.
I was talking about Dell and their “cloud computing” strategy the other day a with an enterprise 2.0 advocate and here’s what we came up with.
Let’s say Dell moves their consumer transaction business onto Azure, from Microsoft. And then let’s say there is a problem with something in that cloud, and just for fun (using an actual example that struck Dell over the Christmas holidays) let’s say your webstore went off line during one of your most lucrative times.
I can imagine the executives at Dell getting on the phone and rounding up their IT staff for a WTF meeting. Butts would be in seats, careers would be on the line, and the millions of dollars that would be missed for each offline minute would be accounted for later when the reckoning was taken. In that scenario Dell would call Dell employees and have 100% leverage on their time.
So now, imagine the same Christmas time scenario but this time the Dell executive calls Microsoft and gets the Sr. Manager on duty for Azure. Now it’s not that Mr. Azure is not going to take the call from the Dell VP seriously. Of course all available resources will be put on the effort to get the Dell store back online. And of course an accounting will be made of what went wrong. And of course EVERYTHING will be done to keep it from happening again.
But the leverage that Dell can exert on the Microsoft employee, the Azure Sr. Manger at any level, no matter how grevious the failure, would be significantly less than the heat that would be felt by those Dell employees.
So how can the cloud be held accountable in the same way an employee is accountable? Microsoft could have insurance and pay Dell for any possible interruption of service. Dell could fire Microsoft and take back their store, although once the cloud is deployed it’s not as easy as redirecting web traffic back to Dell’s home servers.
How can the cloud be as responsive as an owned butt in a seat on Christmas morning?
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/tweet-cloud
