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Please tell me what are the risk mitigation features to consider when choosing a cloud service provider for an organization? Reliability seems to be an issue considering Nirvanix's shut down and Amazon's outage in August 2013. Thank You.

-Nandhini

pnuts
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user2820294
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  • Zac mentions of few of the commons assumptions, but I think to accurately answer this you'd have to express exactly which risks you or your business are concerned about. "All of them" would make this far to vague to answer. – Chris Rasco Oct 04 '13 at 16:41

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Quite the open-ended question, I'm sure just about everyone could spend weeks about risk mitigation. There are many procedures put in place and using Amazon as a provider I'll go through a few.

Amazon has a plethora of tools for disaster recovery, redundancy and general good practise for the Cloud Environment but it is totally up to you if you choose to use them. Let's take Availability Zones as an example.

In each AWS Region (a location where their datacentres are held) they have what they call Availability Zones which are completely separated datacentres in order to improve redundancy. An entire AZ could go offline and not affect the other AZ. A well executed Cloud migration strategy would utilise several of the following:

  • Spread of all necessary VMs, appliances, databases etc. spread evenly over a single or multiple geographic region
  • Utilising auto-scaling groups to allow rapid increase of Infrastructure of a single AZ in case of massive outage in another AZ (also good for flash traffic or periods of high server loads)
  • Utilising Route 53 DNS records to automatically re-route traffic through to nearby Elastic Load Balancers, thus causing your site to have near-zero downtime through an AZ failure as traffic switches over to a new Region or AZ in milliseconds (done at the Amazon level so no waiting for TTL DNS changes)
  • Elastic Load Balancers in general to near automatically place newly spun VMs straight into serving traffic
  • Managed Relational Database Service can place a warm back-up in another AZ in a single Region, instantly spin up multiple Read Replicas and second level Read Replicas

I could go on for days but for a service like AWS with a properly implemented Cloud Strategy they offer a plethora of services and techniques (their white papers at http://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/ allow you to get your feet wet in Security and Deployment)

Zac
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  • Consdiering spreading of VMs or appliances etc., across multiple region to mitigate risk, won't it increase the response time or reduce the speed comparitively? – user2820294 Oct 01 '13 at 15:44
  • @user2820294 The key phrase is "well executed cloud strategy". This isn't easy and it's not a checkbox you mark as complete. It's a way of thinking and planning when you architect your solution and may require rework if the app is an existing one. Compensating for response time is part of this. There are business trade offs for a comprehensive DR/HA solution. Time to test and plan, money for additional instances, and potentially some speed reductions as the network links are inter-region and not local. – Chris Rasco Oct 04 '13 at 16:33