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Aside from infrastructure woes like this, one of the original premises of the internet's resilience was its decentralized and organic design, however, as develo
by hnriot 14y ago
Aside from infrastructure woes like this, one of the original premises of the internet's resilience was its decentralized and organic design, however, as developers migrate to the cloud we are going in the exact opposite direction where a single cloud provider going down takes with it a ton of popular web services. We have moved to the mainframe model and the new IT dept is now GAE, AWS etc. While cloud providers try to decentralize their infrastructure it seems that we are in the early days of figuring out how to do this, because for the past few days we have had major disruption to essential services like tumblr (for kitten photos) et al.
Fortunately to date the affected services are all non essential, mainly entertainment/trivial stuff like blogs, instagram, dropbox etc etc, but when we start to see things like water supply and electrical power management systems, hospital records, aviation system etc affected the consequences could be severe.
If the very best IT minds at AWS and GAE can't keep their systems running, what hope have government departments got? Anyone that's ever been to a DMV, or USPS knows just how good the US Government’s IT departments are.
- germainemalcolm 14y agoHopefully this phase of centralising the cloud will quickly succumb.
- taligent 14y agoIt won't. In fact it will likely get worse as more and more companies deal with big data. There is just too much of a performance benefit to be had by colocating in the same or neigbouring data center.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ChuckMcM 14y agoLeslie Lamport in the 80's "“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable”
- hnriot 14y agoI don't think in the 80's anyone, even a luminary like Lamport really had any idea how distributed systems would evolve. Also he was talking about something different. I very much know there are computers in Google's datacenter that run my apps, and when they go down my computer is not rendered unusable, but rather the service executed by those apps are no longer accessible. Lamport was talking about distributed systems where multiple computers are working together to achieve a common goal. A cloud system is more like a mainframe, or client/server system. Lamport did some fabulous work (at SRI if memory serves) on distributed system.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI will give you an example of Leslie's quote in action. At my house we forward DNS requests to a machine hosted by our ISP. (Well we used to, but let me finish) My wife came up to me and said "the TV is broken." The TV was trying to load its NetFlix application which was trying to resolve a netflix URL which was going through our Internet setup, which went to the ISP's two DNS servers, both of which were offline because the switch they were connected to had failed. Now how to explain to your spouse that the TV is broken because ns-18.sbcglobal.net is not working.
- nicholassmith 14y agoI had to explain to my girlfriend today why our Apple TV would play Netflix but the Internet on laptop failed, BTs DNS pooped and the Apple TV was on a custom DNS provider. She settled with "isn't the Internet weird". Which it is, it's really weird.
- lifeguard 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SONET_ring#Network_architectures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SONET_ring#Network_architecture... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionless_communication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionless_communication
- hayksaakian 14y agoPerhaps thats by design, some things don't need 100% uptime. If I have a personal blog on heroku or enjoy browsing reddit, I'll take the pros over the coins. Mission critical services should probably not be on the cloud until cloud tech matures.
- TwistedWeasel 14y agoDropbox isn't "entertainment/trivial" stuff for many people. Some depend on it heavily.
- TheCapn 14y agoRealistically a lot of utilities are sitting on darknets internally so they shouldn't see disruptions in an internet outage. Telecommunications might be a bit different... I'm curious how things are set up but in my small industrial shop our sites would be 99% fine with a web outage, they'd just be prevented from posting daily receipts to head office.