[LINK] itNews: ' Amazon's botched backup causes cloud chaos'

[Roger Clarke]

You have to laugh, or you'd cry.

The whole point of cloud computing was supposed to be "Rapid 
elasticity (i.e. resources are scalable according to demand)".

But Amazon's explanation for their disaster was:
"We ran out of spare capacity before all of the volumes were able to 
successfully re-mirror," Amazon explained.

The schemozzle began when the power failed.

Amazon's backup generators failed to kick in.

My interpretation of the fuzzy information provided is that foolishly 
designed (and obviously untested) database replication routines went 
mad trying to perform backups and recoveries at the same time, in all 
directions at once.

That resulted in overload, and chaos.

[Some] customers were forced to wait up to three days for Amazon to 
retrieve a snapshot [i.e. complete the recovery?]


Amazon's botched backup causes cloud chaos
Liam Tung
itNews
Aug 17, 2011 6:37 AM (1 hour ago)
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/267086,amazons-botched-backup-causes-cloud-chaos.aspx?eid=1&edate=20110817&utm_source=20110817_AM&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=daily_newsletter


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			            
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University