Why does Verizon have an enterprise cloud? And why is anyone using it?<p>Is it somehow related to their main business? Do the servers run deep within their network allowing quicker access for mobile users? What is their unique selling proposition?<p>They have a whole "why Verizon" section[1]. I don't feel like it answers this question.<p>[1] <a href="http://cloud.verizon.com/why-verizon" rel="nofollow">http://cloud.verizon.com/why-verizon</a>
This articles misses the point of the cloud. The argument for "live migrations" and lambasting of AWS for bouncing servers for the Xen exploit are both completely misguided.<p>The point of the Cloud is not that a server never restarts or has downtime. It's that your app runs on many servers in different AZs and regions such that any one server failing is not going to have a real impact and can be easily and quickly replaced.<p>AWS, when bouncing their servers, did them one az and one region at a time. Because of that, if you ran across multiple AZs you would get to test your failure scenarios, but not be down.<p>The author's focus on other cloud providers having restarts makes it sound like he's saying "Verizon is bad, but in bad company". There is no comparison to be made between taking down your whole cloud, and losing a server here and there.
Two whole days of zero service. In this one moment I have lost all expectations of good service from Verizon's cloud.<p>It doesn't look like customers were given much warning either. This story was originally published on the 6th of Jan. Could you imagine trying to find alternate hosting setup by the weekend if you have any kind of availability expectations? It seems like madness to me. Even if you did move yourself to another host to cover this 48 hours of downtime how likely are you to move the majority of your business over to AWS, Google Cloud, Azure etc.<p>The lack of notice on this seems to be a bigger issue to me than the fact that Verizon is taking their whole cloud out of service for 48 straight hours.
The big print giveth, and the small print taketh away. When the reality fails to live up to the marketing and hype, folks are naturally going to be upset. However, those of us who actually work in IT for a living expect downtime and architect for it. In a perfect world, Verizon's customer reaction should have been one of mild annoyance - "Oh well, guess we'll fail over to our secondary for that weekend". Anyone who drank the 'zero downtime' kool-aid will hopefully treat this as a (deserved) wake-up call that marketing does not excuse poor engineering on their part. Don't like the fact that your 'immortal' cloud provider goes down in planned (and sometimes unplanned) ways? Buy your own iron and do it yourself. It's the only way you can be completely 100% certain it's done right.
> Although I never expect 100 percent uptime, planned outages aren't needed if the cloud platforms are designed correctly. It's quite possible to do live migrations without a server reset these days, yet the cloud providers seem to be missing the boat here.<p>It is slightly more complicated than that.<p>> There should be no cloud outages, ever. Got that?<p>Really? That's not how the real world works. This "article" is pretty crap.