Cloud hit by lightning, ooh the irony!
The other day, no.1 daughter asked, "What is irony?" and I struggled to think of a good example. I think I've found one now though.
After not being able to get my daily dose of cryptic crosswords from the Telegraph website, I contacted them via their main website to have a bit of a moan, and was told in response that,
"At approximately 9:00 pm Sunday 7th August, the site where the puzzle server is based was struck by lightning."
This led me to do a bit of digging, and I quickly found a post on a crossword blog that included a message from Phil McNeill, Telegraph Puzzles Editor, which states that the problem was "... due to an explosion after lightning struck the Amazon ‘cloud’ server in Ireland which hosts Telegraph Puzzles along with many other websites".
The post also features a rather technical outline from Amazon which refers to the effected system as an 'Availability Zone' in Dublin, and suggests the problem was basically a power-outage, and that "We’ve now restored power to the Availability Zone."
Power might have been restored at the time of the post, 8:09 am on Monday the 8th August, but at 3pm the same day, the Telegraph Puzzles service was still offline. After a normal power outage you'd expect servers to reappear online soon after the reconnection of the supply, so was this prolonged, 17 hour+ issue actually caused by using a 'cloud' service, rather than a more conventional data centre set-up? If so, it suggests that the hosting platform most in danger from lightning is 'The Cloud', and vindicates sceptics' views that Cloud computing is another case of the Emperor's New Clothes - something that the Internet industry seems rather prone to.
As usual in these cases, 'The Cloud' means different things to different people, and in my opinion it's simply a way of altering the perception of something that was never really very well understood in the first place, in order to make it easier to sell.
The full Telegraph/Amazon post can be found on bigdave44.com : http://bigdave44.com/2011/08/08/outage-at-telegraph-puzzles/#more-22309
[ 08-Aug-2011 ]
