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Comment by doctor_eval

10 months ago

> In the meantime, UniSuper's woes remain a lesson for companies leaping cloudwards. Someone clicking the wrong button, a previously unknown bug, an unforeseen series of events…

Here’s the thing though. Back in the Dark Ages before cloud services, everyone had to self host. We had a Data General AViiON server (DG/UX FTW!) in a dedicated room, and one of the first RAID arrays in Australia (predecessor of CLARiiON).

The cover was off the front of the array for some reason, and I had to squeeze past a coworker to get out of the room.

Sitting down at my Wyse60 terminal to do some work, a bunch of errors started appearing on my screen. Turns out, I had also “squeezed past” the power button on the RAID array, which was normally recessed - but not when the cover was off. I’d inadvertently shut down the whole system. Fortunately we were in preproduction so nobody really noticed. But it scared the crap out of me.

I knew someone at a small bank who told me they were also susceptible to similar problems. Just one big server, let’s hope it doesn’t go down.

Cloud services - especially IaaS - _enable_ diversification, and it sounds like UniSuper’s IT team should be congratulated for understanding what this really means in the context of networked services. Diverse networks, diverse suppliers, diverse geography.

Without cloud services, none of this is feasible for most SMEs.

There are plenty of things we can complain about with the cloud but “someone clicking the wrong button” is even more of a risk if you run your gear in house.