The MMO That Deleted Itself

[Kageru]

I remember cloud computing. It was when you'd have a socket in the wall through which you'd get access to all the computer resources you needed.

... though writing Multics turned out to be harder than they thought. And it ended up being obsoleted by computing power becoming cheaper faster than they expected.

All that is old can be sold again.

[sam, an eggplant]

Excellent attempt at deflection, but you said they should host in the cloud because it has "all that stuff built in". Using it as a offsite backup target would not have helped, since they didn't take local backups in the first place.

[Yegolev]

My company guarantees four 9s to our clients and has experienced zero client-visible outages this year.

This is a very important statement.

For large stuff, the "cloud" looks a whole lot like what Evil Corporate IT already does, only it's owned by someone else.  Which I think is the point, that if your IT team/budget isn't up to it, you can let someone else worry about these things for a nominal fee.  These people will also probably scrub the outage reports before handing them over, but if the clients don't notice then who gives a fuck?

As for backups, they mean nothing.  Restores, on the other hand, are critical.

[sam, an eggplant]

These people will also probably scrub the outage reports before handing them over, but if the clients don't notice then who gives a fuck?

I work at a MSP, so our clients notice outages very quickly. If traders can't make their trades, users stop buying shirts from an ecommerce website, or players can't login to a MMO, you hear about it right away. There's no way to cover that up. Additionally, we're contractually obligated to disclose outages immediately; if we covered up we'd be subject to stiff penalties.

That said, I was talking about internal outages, in our intranet and support infrastructure. Our clients have outages all the time, our job is to make sure they weren't our fault.

[Yegolev]

I agree completely, and I feel fortunate I don't have to support ecommerce sites or more vigilant end-users than I already do.  We are probably talking about the same thing.  Not "my japanese panty e-store is down" but "we had a storage initiator go toes-up, have to engage hardware vendor to replace, get the change requests in place for the next maintenance weekend".  This isn't something I would expect a client to see or to appear in an executive report.  It would show up at the operational level, and some subsection of managers would eyeball this, but at the end of the day it's BAU and these managers aren't going to report all this to the uppers.

It takes more than one domino falling to bring down the panty e-store in a proper IT installation.

About the cloud, I read you typing that the performance would be terrible for some applications, and I agree based on the metrics we get from "traditional" tech across regions.  It requires some work to manage performance on storage arrays that you own, nevermind those you cannot touch.  Also partition resource sharing, etc, etc.  Some apps are fine, but some require special handling.  Although I suppose you could pay Amazon enough money to give you a top-tier setup.

[Ironwood]

Excellent attempt at deflection, but you said they should host in the cloud because it has "all that stuff built in". Using it as a offsite backup target would not have helped, since they didn't take local backups in the first place.

Look at the post above mine.  The one I was replying to before you waded in with your nonsense.

There you go.

[kildorn]

Excellent attempt at deflection, but you said they should host in the cloud because it has "all that stuff built in". Using it as a offsite backup target would not have helped, since they didn't take local backups in the first place.

Look at the post above mine.  The one I was replying to before you waded in with your nonsense.

There you go.

I have no idea what your post has to do with mine, either. I didn't mention backups at all. I don't give half a fuck where your backup target is, as long as it can handle the rate of change in a reasonable amount of time and restore properly somewhere.

We wandered off chatting about cloud computing, or at least one random definition of that lovely buzzword of the decade. I have my opinions on what it is and is not good for. I highly disagree with anyone trying to run all their production off EC2 and the like. It's just not what they are built for at all. And I'm definitely not looking for a job, so *boggle*.

[sam, an eggplant]

Yeah, I think he got lost somewhere.

Anyway, how about that schadenfreude, eh? Deleted their whole MMO! Delicious!