Cloud backup could have prevented Delta’s meltdown
Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.
I hope you weren’t flying Delta this week. If you were, you know that Delta’s systems experienced an outage, and of course passengers bore the brunt of it in hundreds of canceled and delayed flights. When Delta performs a postmortem on this outage, it will likely find that the outage was caused by a common occurrence: network failure.
However, Delta could not recover or switch to backup systems. As my InfoWorld colleague Andrew C. Oliver wrote, Delta neglected the four pillars of high availability. Delta’s CEO admitted as much, telling the Wall Street Journal that "it’s not clear the priorities in our investment have been in the right place…


This week, Google announced that it is lowering prices on its preemptible virtual machines (VMs) to help businesses gain even more affordable options within the Google Compute Engine. Although the market rate for using Google Compute Engine is by many measures already a fair price, it still may not be practical for some smaller organizations.