Scattered clouds

Image from Pixabay

Just when I had pretty much accepted that the statement “the cloud is someone else's computer” is very boomerish, an important cloud service collapsed on Wednesday: Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft services no longer worked. What is it with that cloud?

In 2016 I gave a presentation entitled The cloud is not a light cloud dessert (‘cloud dessert’ is a straightforward translation of the Dutch ‘wolkentoetje’, which is a fluffy dessert here in the Netherlands). The title slide featured a photo of Captain Kirk from the science fiction series Star Trek, followed by that series' intro. I slightly modified the epic words spoken in the intro in my subtitles:

Cloud: the final frontier

These are the storages of the computing enterprise

It's never-ending mission

To explore strange new servers

To seek out new privacy and new legislations

To boldly go where no byte has gone before.

See, that cloud is someone else's computer, that's just a fact. It simply means that you do not use your own equipment, but – depending on the chosen model – you use the infrastructure, a development platform or a complete application for end users of your cloud supplier. As a private person you are mainly familiar with the latter variant; chances are that the photos you take with your phone are stored in the Apple or Google cloud – and not on the phone itself. Your Word and Excel files are no longer on your laptop, but in the Microsoft cloud. LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Twitter, Zoom, Teams, Netflix: all of them are cloud services.

Why do companies use the cloud? Suppose you have a company that receives an enormous number of customers once or a few times a year, much more than in the rest of the year. Think, for example, of online shops around the holidays, the tax authorities during the period when everyone files a tax return or a ticket seller for a world star concert. You must have experienced that such a site told you: sorry, currently too busy, please try again later. That situation will occur more likely in organizations that have all the equipment under their own management, in their own data center. They have a limited amount of servers and storage and network capacity there. To avoid this, such a company would have to oversize its data center. A lot of equipment is just sitting there for a large part of the year.

The tempting thing about the cloud is that you purchase their services as needed, and that you can scale up and down quickly. The cloud is elastic, as they say. Cloud providers have huge data centers, with which they serve many customers from all over the world. Because they are so large, and not all customers peak at the same time, they can distribute their enormous capacity among all those customers. If one asks for more, it will not be at the expense of another customer. In addition to this flexibility, the cloud has another important advantage: you do not have to maintain and secure everything yourself. Moreover, for many organizations, a cloud supplier can do this much better than they could do themselves.

But then something like last week happens. Azure, Microsoft's cloud service, had an outage that affected users worldwide. That is quite exceptional, because the major cloud suppliers have built data centers all over the world, which also work as each other's backup. But in this case there was a network problem, which also affected the link between those data centers. If something like this happens in your own data center, only your customers will be affected. Many companies with their own data center are more likely to have disruptions affecting their customers than companies that live in the cloud, because of the elasticity and flexibility of the cloud. But the number of affected customers is much smaller: only the customers of that company are affected. A comparison forces itself upon us: flying is much safer than driving a car, but if an airplane crashes, there are often many casualties.

In my Star Trek intro I mentioned 'strange new servers'. The word ‘strange’ has multiple meanings. But 'unknown' in particular applies here: the cloud is a black box for us into which we put things, hoping that we will also get something out of it when we need it. If it fails to do so, you are just as powerless as if you were on a stranded train. It's just a matter of how comfortable you feel about that.

Solution

Last week I challenged you to discover which parts of the blog were written by me and which by ChatGPT. You can find the solution here.

And in the big bad world…

This section contains a selection of news articles I came across in the past week. Because the original version of this blog post is aimed at readers in the Netherlands, it contains some links to articles in Dutch. Where no language is indicated, the article is in English.

2023-01-27