Stop Blaming Your Cloud Provider
Douglas Karr
Fractional CMO, Digital Transformation Consultant, Speaker, and Author. Founder of Martech Zone. I'm a proud Desert Shield / Desert Storm U.S. Navy Veteran.
One of the providers that I use wrote an email today that they had an outage. Unfortunately, it wasn't the first time this happened. The message pretty much went like this...
Like a ton of other sites, we were down today because of AWS.
This is unacceptable.
You and your engineers knowingly made the decision that there would be a 100% dependency with the risk of a single point of failure within your platform.
You were not forced to build your platform this way. You were not forced to use that cloud service. You could have implemented redundant solutions with failover technology that would keep your customers operational.
Perhaps you designed the platform this way to save a few bucks. That's fine - but even if it there was a cost to maximize uptime, it's something clients like me might be glad to cover the cost of.
I would appreciate an outage message that stated the following:
We apologize for the repeated outages. We have identified the issue and are seeking to eliminate this single point of failure with our cloud provider. Our engineers are reviewing the cost and timeline associated with building redundant systems with automated failover capabilities. This would ensure we could route traffic to an alternative system in the event of an upstream outage. There may be a cost to this so we may offer a second tier of pricing for that service. Please reply to this email if you're interested. If you require a service level agreement (SLA) and guaranteed uptime, we can also discuss those options with you.
Build it. We'll pay for it.
But please stop blaming your cloud provider as an excuse for your poorly designed infrastructure.
Thanks.
I make software and help other people do the same
7 年Spot on, Doug, so true. Most customers are happy to assume "it's better because cloud", right up until there's an outage and the vendor has no good answer for them. "Cloud" does not magically solve the single-point-of-failure situation, it just changes its physical location to another company's servers.
Tenacious enterprise mission-driven high performance SaaS Sales Leader; ex-Twilio & Akamai
7 年Janrain, CIAM platform, uses AWS globally but our design and architecture has ensured little to no down time with seconds for failover when AWS has an outage! We have some great customer stories with hurricanes etc where Janrain was still running but the customer websites were down.
CTO Co-Founder | Building Software Companies | Leading Innovation Contact Center and Telecom Aficionado
7 年Spot on Mr. Karr Everything at AWS fails all the time, have to build around it. BF
IT Director | CIO / vCIO | IT Manager | IT Project Manager | Operations Manager
7 年Loved this, Doug. You're exactly right. It's like the company without a UPS and generator blaming the power company every time there is a power outage and their systems lose juice. It's going to happen, prepare accordingly.
CMO at Jellyfish | Board Member | Advisor | Dad x2 | Author x3
7 年Amen