Designing For Dependability In The Cloud
March 29, 2013
Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: David Bills.
This article kicks off a three-part series on designing for dependability. Today I will provide context for the series, and outline the challenges facing all cloud service providers as they strive to provide highly available services. In the second article of the series, David Gauthier, director of data center architecture at Microsoft, will discuss the journey that Microsoft is on in our own data centers, and how software resiliency has become more and more critical in the move to cloud-scale data centers. Finally, in the last piece, I will discuss cultural shift and evolving engineering principles that Microsoft is pursuing to help improve the dependability of the services we offer.
Matching the Reliability to the Demand
As the adoption of cloud computing continues to grow, expectations for utility-grade service availability remain high. Consumers demand access 24 hours a day, seven days a week to their digital lives, and outages can have a significant negative impact on a company’s financial health or brand equity. But the complex nature of cloud computing means that cloud service providers, regardless of whether they sell offerings for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS), need to be mindful that things will go wrong — because it’s not a case of “if things will go wrong,” it’s strictly a matter of “when.”…
This means, as cloud service providers, we need to design our services to maximize the reliability of the service and minimize the impact to customers when things do go wrong. Providers need to move beyond the traditional premise of relying on complex physical infrastructure to build redundancy into their cloud services to instead utilize a combination of less complex physical infrastructure and more intelligent software that builds resiliency into their cloud services and delivers high availability to customers…
Read more from the source @ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/03/27/designing-for-dependability-in-the-cloud-part-1/