Enduring Lighting Strikes and Power Outages in the Cloud

In early August, a lightning strike at a transformer owned by one of Amazon’s power suppliers caused a major failure in Amazon Web Services' European cloud. The power outage affected, among others, the Elastic Compute Cloud (ECS) and Rational Database Service (RDS) cloud services.

According to the Amazon Web Services status page, a transformer from an energy supplier for one of the availability zones (EU-WEST-1 region) in Dublin was struck by lightning. An availability zone is a set of hardware that supports cloud services and that functions independently of other zones. According to the site, the cloud services were weakened by the impact. Since the cloud services are composed of complex software components, Amazon had to assign more hardware to restore its cloud services after the power had been restored.

This is the type of event that causes some businesses to doubt the benefits of cloud computing and to believe that it is not a safe or reliable method of hosting data. While these doubts are understandable, the fact is there are a variety of techniques a cloud computing company can apply to mitigate disruption caused by weather events and resulting power outages.

One option, depending on a client’s business requirements, is for the cloud provider to distribute its servers over multiple availability zones (AZ). This redundancy provides excellent protection from localized emergencies such as a lightning strike, power surge or other severe weather related events.

For other customers, monitoring and frequent back ups can mitigate problems when incidents occur. With careful monitoring, engineers will be informed immediately when servers are unreachable. Then, using snapshots of all servers taken on an hourly basis, it is possible to boot the relevant servers in AZ’s that are available.

Several physical redundancies can also help to mitigate problems. These include redundant power supplies and backup generators that are tested to assure they will kick on when the power fails—unlike Amazon’s generators in Dublin. Using redundant Internet connections running simultaneously provides a backup if one provider fails or is performing poorly. Redundant hardware, such as multiple hard drives and other components, can be arranged so that if one fails, another immediately and seamlessly take its place.

About Jitscale
Jitscale was founded in 2008 by IC&S, an international integrator with over 12 years of experience in managing high-end IT infrastructures for listed companies and multinationals, and has offices in The Netherlands and the United States. The company offers full management and optimization of business-critical IT infrastructures with an autonomous view on usage of technology and soft- and hardware. Jitscale’s engineers are specialized, experienced, certified and trained in supporting complex internet-related platforms; from operating systems to database and application clusters. Jitscale enables companies – supported by consultancy and optimization, excellent customer services, strong customer focus and leading technologies – to focus on their core business and to meet company and business objectives by fully outsourcing their IT platforms. All Jitscale services are accompanied by a comprehensive and tailor-made service level agreement guaranteeing the highest level of customer satisfaction.

Jitscale is ISO 27001 and NEN 7510 certified. The ISO 27001-standard concentrates on a process-oriented approach to planning, implementation, application, control, evaluation and maintenance, as well as on the continuous improvement of information security management.

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This release was published on openPR.