What are the most common cloud outages and how to prevent them?

A service disruption is a technical perfect storm. Initial mistakes made by engineers can cause the appearance of several other bugs and glitches.

The fact with the cloud is that “a host can and will fail” says Evan Cooke, Twilio’s co-founder and chief technology officer. Cooke learned that the most important premise when it comes to the cloud is assuming that the network will have glitches. This happened when Twilio, a company that helps developers integrates communications into their Web applications and which uses Amazon’s EC2 hosting services, suffered an outage. So, how do you avoid this kind of problem? Not relying on any single machine or single component in the core architecture itself could be a solution.

Another common problem is data back-up.  In order to avoid problems with back-up, especially when it comes to crucial data, never assume that someone else is automatically protecting you. When deciding to move your data to the cloud, make sure your provider has a back-up plan or a disaster recovery setup. Even better, make your own arrangements to back up your data.

What are the solutions when data centers suffer down times? Yes, this may happen. And when your company holds the keys to the customer service operations of tens of thousands of businesses, this may be a huge problem. Because no provider can guarantee that its data center will not suffer down time, you, as a customer, should decide whether your business’s data can endure occasional downtime. If not, try to find a cloud provider that is able to build a level of redundancy as good or better than you can do on your own.

Another common outage is a data center going offline for several hours that could make users unable to access data stored in the center for the entire time. But having your data available on multiple servers in multiple data centers, or even different regions may prevent this kind of disaster. You could also spread your data to different providers.

All in one, no simple server center or service is 100% reliable. A data outage may have dangerous consequences for your business, customers, revenue and data. So the best solution to solve most of the problems that can occur from a service disruption in the cloud is to be prepared for all types of disasters.

Types of cloud outages can be predicted. When searching for a solution like moving your data to the cloud, think of all the problems that can appear and search for a provider that can offer you a solution to prevent most of these issues.

Photo source: https://www.sxc.hu/photo/1155467.