Moving to Cloud? Shared Environment Can Be Deadly!
Sharing economy has been booming these years, from the rapid growth of Uber, AirBnB, and TaskRabbit (a mobile market place for people to hire other people to do jobs and tasks) … etc., it seems that sharing stands for more resources with little cost. Otherwise, is sharing economy also applicable to cloud business? Before exploring the article, let’s hear from the monologue of the developer.
Monologue of a developer.
Hi, my dear friendly neighbors. Please give me some peace. I only want a good night’s sleep. Whilst many providers do and try to isolate environments, the cloud does have a lot of sharing going on. The network is shared, the physical server is shared and the data center is shared.
“If a certain power circuit trips from your provider, you can be effected! ”
Everything is on the provider!
You don’t have your own data center, cages nor rack space. Any issues or accidents and changes of any sort can cause you outages. Maintenance work, including upgrades can give you downtime — downtime you can’t always schedule for and workaround. Outages are at the hands of the provider. If a neighbor, i.e. another cloud user did something that crashed the system, you’d also be out of luck.
As your IP and/or IP block may be shared you run the risk of having it blacklisted or blocked due to a bad neighbor. You cannot control the delisting process except asking for help. You’re at the mercy of the provider.
Any network issue, such a routing issue (high latency) is also on your provider. You cannot do anything whilst waiting for a fix. You may not be able to perform everyday work now that everything has been moved to the cloud.
You cannot pick or choose the data center. A natural disaster, such as a flood or typhoon can take out a provider’s data center and your services could be out for days.
What can you do?
Don’t put all eggs in one basket. Work with multiple providers for redundancy. Make sure your tooling and processes support this. Keep a close watch on each vendor and make sure they understand that you still have choices, even though you’ve moved to the cloud. You are not vulnerable and held up.
Do they understand me?
A public cloud provider services all clients. There isn’t much environment specific details. Support may take longer. You may need to engage and escalate a few levels of helpdesk before you find the right person that understand what you specifically need vs someone already familiar with your business requirements.
How do I deal with noisy neighbors?
CPU, IO performance and network are all precious shared resources. It’s shared and limited. We all get slices. Some providers will try as much as possible to give everyone a fair go, but this might not be the best solution. Exact tight control means more overhead and lower performance for everyone. Pick a provider that will not as likely to overload a server but spikes can still happen. There sometimes isn’t much you can do a public environment. For mission critical workloads, it may be best to have a dedicated environment to avoid these issues.
I am scared: wider attack vector
If you happen to follow the cloud news from 2012, the hack of online storage provider Dropbox then you must be shocked. In the previous month, it was revealed that the leaking damage was actually far greater than previously disclosed. Users data are being sold in the black market. To hackers big attack targets such as dropbox are valuable. It is a good target. The cloud environment and hypervisors make it it easier for them. It’s an extra layer to secure. The attack vector is wider. There are many more known exploits and possible ways to attack the server. It could be that your neighbor is hacked and through that exposed a loop hole to take over the entire cloud cluster. Be aware of the implications. Secure your environment via the provided firewalls and best practices at all times.
Your provider is public and well known. The list of IPs is well known. If a neighbor did anything that results in a DDoS attack you can be effected too. You may not need DDoS protection and the costs associated with it, but may still get outages from others overloading the server you are on. DDoS is now a common occurrence across the globe and costs businesses billions of dollars in revenue due to downtime.
“Are you ready to take the risk?”
In a private environment, you ensure that attacks are most likely only if it’s something related to your services. For a private cloud environment, if your services don’t even need access to the public Internet, this can be avoided altogether as the private cloud is connected directly to your office.
Stay Tuned!
In the HyperCorner, I will discuss more practical solutions about Cloud computing. Please stay tuned to this series! Next week, let’s talk about tooling changes. It’s another important issue when you are trying to adopt the cloud! Hope I can help you to make the best decision!
Any question, please contact us.
E-mail: marketing@hyperconnezion.com
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【About the author】
Harry Chan, the founder of HyperConnezion, was born in Hong Kong and raised and educated in Sydney, Australia. Have nearly 5.5 years in managing IT startup, and 6 years experience as a developer, consultant, and system administrator.
【About HyperConnezion】
HyperConnezion is a cloud and managed services provider. Our focus is tailor-made, custom solutions in Asia Pacific. We cater to individuals, small businesses and all the way to large enterprises that need simply the best. No matter the complexity or scale, we’re here as your IT companion to guide you through any hardships in technology. Follow us on:
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