Microsoft had three staff at Australian data centre campus when Azure went out
itnews.com.au
itnews.com.au
The only people who should be shocked in this thread are the people who have been hoodwinked into thinking operations is so hard you need thousands of staff. I know AWS/GCP/Azure like to charge us as if we were hiring an army of sysadmins, but the truth is that day-to-day DC ops does not require so many people. Hardware failures are more rare than you think and you can work around them without panicking anyway.
In this case they can't even get blamed for their vendor choice because both AWS and Azure are now so big that they're in "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" territory.
I don’t think AWS is blowing up a vendors phone when something goes wrong in one of their facilities.
[1] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/04/07/how-...
All the same gear is still there, its control functions are just ceded to Amazon panels. And integrated to the point of even removing some PLC like devices.
That said I have no idea. When I worked (many many many many years ago) in a small DC that is perhaps the size of a 2bed apartment we had 4 guys scurrying about doing stuff (hands-on-keyboard, routing cables, replacing hardware etc). This was way before Docker & Kubernetes et al - physical iron and all that. I would assume that in modern DC ops you could run a football field sized DC with less than 10 people due to automation. But that said if part of the actual infrastructure like power or cooling fails, you need to have the right skill-set in place. If the cooler's failed and couldn't just be turned off and on again, we would have been out of luck in my old DC days and would need to call someone in and just hope the servers didn't fry in the meantime. Sounds like a similar deal here.
Larger DCs can and do have more staff on-site 24/7 and typically the amount of staff on-site at any given time is driven by SLAs.
I expect the DC in TFA to return to lower staff levels once they've worked on reducing their total "time to restart chiller" or reduced the amount of manual work involved in doing so.
A datacenter with tight SLAs probably needs one 24/7 tech and one 24/7 security guard. That's acheivable with 5 jobs for each, so 10 jobs total. Maybe a couple more techs if the ticket volume is high. Never going to be hundreds of permanent jobs.
Bear in mind that outside of the US and maybe one or two other locations ex-US, almost all of the magic cloud operates out of third-party datacentres, not their own.
They will have a small office on-site where 3–5 people sit, and those people are exclusively dedicated to the cloud equipment itself. The datacentre ops side is, by definition, handled by the third-party datacentre operator.
The guys onsite are clearly only there for "intelligent hands" purposes, as everything else will be done remotely from silicon valley or wherever.
Across all the datacenters the number of operations personnel likely exceeds 100. Think of the unit of scale as a datacenter, with an availability zone potentially containing 10+ of those.
[1] https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/cloud/article/11427911/aw...
They go on site to geographically adjacent DCs and outside that just travel onsite for special projects.
I've slept so much better since I began hosting, producing energy, and cooling on-prem
For those that do need to use cloud, just make sure you are running your services in different failure zones.
People talk about this often but this failure mode seems to never happen? When was the last time us-east-1 went down because of a natural calamity compared to some technical issue?
.... Of course then you have latency issues to think about, but that is often quite application-specific and potentially a good problem to have if a slightly slow website or database or whatever is the biggest problem you have when the alternative would have been a total shutdown.
There are also occasional fires and stuff that take out a whole building (I think OVH had this in France recently?). Ensure that your failure zones are physically separate places, and not just logically-separate zones in the same physical building, or in a building that is next to the one on fire :)
Right but what type of datacenter related incidents did they cause? Did us-east-1 go down because of hurricane sandy? Did us-west-1 go down because of wildfires? I don't seem to remember any datacenter outages caused by wide area natural disasters, whereas I can remember plenty caused by BGP/DNS/config shenanigans.
Nope, but Sandy did a hell of a lot of damage to some key telecommunications infrastructure. Verizon lost multiple floors worth of equipment, cabling, and related infrastructure that served at least their customers across Manhattan.
Having geographical redundancy for mission critical workloads is a good investment if your business is making money. Networked computing is one of the few places we can actually “run away” from a physical source of problems. (Not forever, or universally, of course).
We’re based on the eastern seaboard. You bet we have failsafes in areas less susceptible to natural disaster.
No, but I was at a company with all the production services in Reston, VA during that storm, and we would have been pretty screwed if Sandy made landfall in the DC area instead of continuing north.
Sandy's flooding in NYC wasn't great for some of the datacenters there, I seem to recall some having trouble, but most were fine.
BGP and DNS are certainly much better at causing disruption, and especially global disruption though.
By which time you might as well just roll out your own kit in colocation or your own datacentres.
The cloud providers are nickle and dimers, they charge you for every little tiny thing.
Cloud might look cheap at cents-per-hour, but then you find you need X "services" to deliver your Service and so you are talking about exponential cents-per-hour (X cloud services times x cents-per-hour).
And then running your services across failure zones will of course cost you more beyond the basic double-cost, because most cloud providers charge by the GB for cross-zone traffic. So if you're doing cross-zone replication, that's gonna cost you a pretty penny.
Meanwhile, in your own colo/DC, you have predictable costs. And you can get redundant connections between sites for a flat rate, not some stupid per GB fee.
I would be very, very surprised if the companies mentioned, in particular banks, weren't running on multiple AZs, but I wouldn't be surprised if the scenario of severing down an AZ was not tested.
It is.
The cloud fanbois will tell you until their blue in the face that its not.
I fully accept that the cloud is great for bursty workloads where you're doing nothing and then suddenly half the planet needs your service for a couple of days. That is clear.
But if you've got a reasonably stable baseload running 24x7x365 and a few modest bursts here and there then honestly people need to do the math, because if you look at beyond the short-term figures, the cloud tends to work out much more expensive than colo if you look at for example a three-year period.
Most people don't need the scale the cloud gives. They think they do, but really most people will never grow to FANG scale as much as they may dream it !
Also on the price side, I'm not comparing the price of cloud vs colo, but the price of cloud vs what the company IT department charges my department for being allowed to use one of 'their' colo servers, and that is many times what a cloud server costs. (as a real world example, the place I used to work internally invoiced $150/server/month for a virtual server that would cost me $20/server/month on AWS before any discounts).
Cloud lives not by competing against smart people running their own servers, but against inefficient internal IT services, and there they have them beat both on price and quality.
The whole point of my job is to enable developers to deliver code that provides customers value. On that level I actually embrace the common "condescensions" (so-to-speak) that I'm tech support for developers or a YAML wrangler.
I actually had an experience recently where a developer asked to make some changes to our infrastructure. I pretty much developed our container orchestration system (based on Docker Swarm rather than Kubernetes - a choice our architect made that I've come to appreciate), so I walked him through how my IaC works, told him what he needed to change and then reviewed his pull request and applied the changes. I guess we're on a devops journey now if I want to put it in corpo-tech speak.
Anyway, I suppose a lot of IT departments/guys get lost in creating their "perfect" unassailable systems and forget that the big picture is that the job is to enable customers; most directly are likely to be the developers or other internal employees, but ultimately the end customer who's handing you money to solve their problems.
This idea that you can build a DC that competes on cost for rented cloud compute - it might be technically true but it’s mostly missing the point of why modern shops prefer the cloud.
Oh you are hilarious.
Time for your daily reminder that failovers, monitoring and backups DO NOT EXIST in the cloud UNLESS (a) you configure and manage them (b) deploy your services in multiple zones (and spend $$$$$ along the way).
Lots of people cannot do (a) properly and it is regularly demonstrated by AWS US-East-1 and others that not many people do (b) fully, or in many cases, don't do it at all.
So yeah, the cloud is still "complicated", it's just a different sort of complicated. And if you do failovers, monitoring and backups properly, the cloud is still "expensive", its just a different sort of expensive.
Making an RDS postgres instance multi-az with automatic failover, and bulletproof backups to s3 is ticking a couple of boxes. Compared to building all of that yourself at the same level of uptime - its not complexity of the same magnitude at all. And sure it will cost you more for the instances for redundancy, but its pretty easily worth it - i dont have to pay an ops team to babysit my databases. Thats just postgres - not even getting into things like aurora, dynamo, kinesis, sqs, lambda - things that either dont have a self-hosted equivalent at all, or if they do are way more complicated to run at scale than PG.
In some cases its trading cloud costs for personnel costs. Both opex. But in many others its having access to services, datastores etc that i couldnt otherwise have as a dev.