Your cloud system is experiencing downtime. How can you reassure stakeholders without inciting fear?

Clear, concise, and regular communication with all relevant stakeholders is key to calm their nerves. A person not involved in the troubleshooting itself (Team Lead or Manager) should handle this, based on the inputs provided by the team addressing the issue. The following should ideally be in place to expedite resolution: 1. Monitoring and alerting mechanisms for systems and applications. 2. A disaster recovery site, along with RTO and RPO for failover. 3. The best personnel who know the application/system inside out. Once the issue is resolved, a root cause analysis should be performed and documented so that preventive measures can be put in place. Also, indicate whether a workaround was applied or a permanent fix is in place.

When your cloud system is experiencing downtime, reassure stakeholders by communicating transparently and calmly. Start by acknowledging the issue and expressing understanding of their concerns. Provide a clear explanation of what happened and outline the steps being taken to resolve it. Share an estimated timeline for recovery and keep them updated on progress. Highlight any measures in place to prevent similar issues in the future. Emphasize your commitment to restoring full service promptly and maintaining reliability. Additionally, offer to address any specific concerns or questions they may have directly. This approach helps maintain trust and confidence without causing unnecessary alarm.

Accurately assess what parts of the system / which services are down and what's the end user impact. Clearly and transparently communicate these facts to the stakeholders along with visibility on next set of steps that you/your team will take to bring the system back. Also share SLA's for completing the next steps and meet those SLA's. Keep your stakeholders frequently posted about what steps have been taken to get the system up and running again / what's the outcome observed from these steps and what's the further course of action.

If you are a Technology leader, you will have to present the impact of this downtime to the business. So, be ready with the impact analysis. How much money did we loose during this time ? What was the cost incurred for running the system on DR ? such questions can be useful in creating a report.

Typical flow of the sequence of incident operations : 1. Issue is reported by end users 2. Issue is analyzed by support team 3. Proactive communication to Stakeholders, IT engineer 4. Data integrity verification 5. Data recovery - restore the backups - DR plan Failover to backup secondary running environment 6. Post recovery - Once the recovery is done, verify functionality to make sure application or cloud service works as usual, run functional test validation to make sure data is intact - Detailed Root cause analysis this is the step where gaps are identified, in terms of DR plan gaps, security concerns, Failover DR testing issues, ......backup/restore issues, .... 7. Next is to address gaps, which is an on-going process

Sending a brief, clear message within 15 minutes of detecting an issue can prevent stakeholder panic and rumor mills. Be specific: "We're experiencing an EKS cluster outage in us-west-2; our SRE team is implementing a failover to us-east-1." This level of transparency builds trust and demonstrates your team's competence in handling critical situations.

Get an analysis done fairly quickly if restarting the problematic services / cloud infra instances can help with a quick temporary resolution while the engineers troubleshoot for a more permanent fix. If you can isolate failed services and provide alternative workflow(s) to the end user that can be yet another mechanism to reassure stakeholders. Remember getting your system up again is your 1st priority rather than root causing why and how of what caused the downtime. Once the system is up, you should certainly invest time in doing RCA. Also share findings of your RCA and how you will prevent such problems to re-occur in future with your stakeholders.

The action plan should already be in place for DR and business continuity. Keep the stakeholders updated in real-time. Having a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud can be a good cost optimized option for failover.

System downtimes are clearly high-stress / high-pressure situations. But one is expected to keep calm and not to buckle into stress. Do NOT be in a hurry to roll out a hotfix. You & your stakeholders certainly wouldn't want to get into a situation of yet another production incident because a half-tested fix was deployed in production. Clearly explain what kind of effort is needed for the fix & what specific testing should be done to ensure that any regression issue doesn't leak into your production environment. Accordingly, set expectations for a permanent fix to be deployed. For reducing business-critical impact at times you may have to deploy a quick workaround but assess the effectiveness of that workaround beforehand.

Yes, cloud downtime is an event that needs a thorough introspection and documentation. It should be followed by a complete postmortem.

There should be a solid monitoring/alerting system in place. Also, It is a great idea to have mock downtime drills, similar to Netflix's Chaos Monkey.