A latest information centre outage in Sydney affected a number of cloud service suppliers and companies, together with Bank of Queensland and Jetstar. After this and different incidents, cloud clients would possibly properly ask if the identical factor may occur to them — and learn how to mitigate it earlier than it occurs.
Can the dangers of bodily information centres be managed?
TechRepublic spoke with Nam Je Cho, director of options structure for AWS Australia and New Zealand, and Guy Danskine, managing director at information centre supplier Equinix Australia, who’re each in field seats to witness the area’s embrace of the cloud.
Cho and Danskine have really useful a variety of methods, together with embracing geographic range, making certain there are built-in redundancies, searching for out information centre administration greatest practices and contemplating the chance advantages of hybrid multicloud infrastructure.
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Australia’s information centre outages present some dangers do stay
Australian organisations have been reminded that cloud computing dangers do exist in August 2023. A lightning strike on electrical infrastructure 18 miles from a Sydney information centre prompted a utility voltage sag, tripping a subset of the ability’s cooling system chiller items offline.
Azure, Oracle and NetSuite hit by Sydney information centre outage
As affected cloud service supplier Microsoft Azure reported in a post-incident report, whereas technicians have been working to repair the issue, temperatures within the information centre elevated to ranges above operational thresholds. A subset of compute and storage scale items then needed to be powered right down to decrease temperatures and forestall {hardware} injury.
The incident impacted cloud clients, starting round 10:30 UTC and lasting till 22:40 UTC. For a few of this time, Bank of Queensland clients skilled bother with the financial institution’s app, and banking transactions weren’t being mirrored accurately in buyer accounts. Jetstar clients, in the meantime, had bother logging in, managing bookings and checking in for flights.
SEE: Australian and New Zealand enterprises are additionally going through strain to optimise cloud methods.
Azure was not the one service impacted. As it was a shared information centre, Oracle Cloud and NetSuite providers have been additionally impacted by outages.
Outages like Google’s in Melbourne in 2021 enhance resilience focus
There are different information centre outages on the minds of native cloud clients. Only a month or so after the launch of the model new area in Melbourne in 2021, Google Cloud Services in australia-southeast2 went down for 1 hour and half-hour on account of transient voltage points.
In a assertion on the incident on the time, Google mentioned “the root cause of the issue was transient voltage at the feeder to the network equipment, causing the equipment to reboot. In order to mitigate the issue, traffic within the australia-southeast2 region was redirected temporarily.”
Forrester’s latest State of Cloud in Australia and New Zealand report prompt incidents like this outage, in addition to environmental uncertainties, have been encouraging organisations to contemplate revisiting their threat mitigation methods.
“Between the global pandemic, cloud outages in 2021 such as the Google outage in Melbourne, fires and floods in Australia and earthquakes in New Zealand, enterprises are prioritising resilience,” Forrester reported.
Forrester mentioned threat mitigation might embody “building greater risk awareness, leveraging multiple AZs (availability zones) for high-priority workloads, mitigating supplier risk through multi-cloud skill sets or scenario-building against potential risks.”
Trust in cloud remains to be driving information centre enlargement
AWS providers tons of of hundreds of companies throughout Australia and New Zealand, together with Atlassian, NAB, and public sector businesses just like the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Western Australia’s Department of Education. Equinix, likewise, is trusted by clients in vital industries, together with healthcare, monetary providers and authorities.
This calibre of buyer must have cloud service across the clock with out disruption.
Equinix Australia’s Danskine mentioned organisations perceive that information centres and the cloud are taking part in a foundational position in supporting their companies. Danskine added that the scalability, reliability and cost-efficiency of cloud applied sciences and infrastructure are what allow organisations to function successfully in an more and more digital economic system.
“Robust digital infrastructure is fundamental,” Danskine mentioned. “It enables organisations to connect users, customers and employees, enhances data security and allows them to adapt to evolving market demands.”
This demand is propelling Equinix’s progress. It has 51 information centres within the APAC area, together with 22 in Australia, situated in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth and Adelaide.
It can be investing over AU $1 billion (US $645 million) in 13 tasks that may see new information centres in-built Australia, India, Japan and Korea in addition to expanded services in Indonesia and Malaysia.
“We’re always looking for the right opportunity to expand, in line with customer and market demand, to ensure we can best support current and future requirements,” Danskine mentioned.
Meanwhile, AWS is investing AU $13.2 billion (US $8.44 billion) into infrastructure from 2023 to 2027 throughout Australia, and is constructing a brand new area in Auckland with three availability zones.
Investments like these of AWS and Equinix are underpinning what Forrester has referred to as “a new scale of public cloud usage” in Australasia. Organisations at the moment migrating to the cloud anticipate a mean of 46% of workloads to be within the cloud throughout the subsequent two years.
As digital transformation continues to be a excessive precedence, Danskine mentioned that companies are trusting information centres and the cloud to offer the infrastructure wanted to gasoline innovation, assist excessive ranges of availability and “drive growth in a data-driven world”.
Providers are designing the cloud to mitigate information centre threat
Despite robust ranges of belief, Danskine mentioned the market was not threat free.
“After the pandemic, many organisations are operating with fewer staff onsite, so the possibility of a system failure, even with automated remote monitoring and preventive maintenance, has increased,” Danskine mentioned.
One strategy to fight this threat is for organisations to make sure they’ve energy redundancy to decrease the influence of a system failure.
SEE: This threat administration coverage will assist assist your organisation’s resilience.
“At Equinix, we provide fully redundant electrical and mechanical infrastructure as standard to our global data centre customers,” Danskine mentioned.
AWS focuses on availability zones to mitigate threat of downtime
Risk mitigation is a central design characteristic for cloud and information centre suppliers. For instance, AWS, like different cloud suppliers, provides a number of availability zones inside all of its areas. This means an software could be partitioned throughout totally different geographies.
“AZ’s are physically separated by a meaningful distance, many kilometres, although all are within 100 kilometres (60 miles) of each other,” AWS’s Cho mentioned. “Each AZ has impartial energy, cooling and bodily safety and is related through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.
“If an application is partitioned across AZs, companies are better isolated and protected from issues such as power outages, natural weather events and more.”
Multi-AZ managed providers just like the Amazon Relational Database Service and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service permit its clients to pick out which AZs they deploy throughout.
“If there is an infrastructure event in a single AZ, there is managed and automatic failover to a second AZ and failback as appropriate, with little to no service disruptions,” Cho mentioned. “Our customers are running mission-critical workloads by deploying workloads with multi-AZs and/or multi-regions architectures to achieve high availability.”
Equinix searching for continuous enchancment in information centre administration
Equinix is constant to discover methods of accelerating the operational integrity and security of its information centres (Figure A). One instance is that vital upkeep at all times takes place with a minimal of two certified engineers current to double-check one another’s work.
Figure A
When clients select to make use of its software-defined interconnection platform, Equinix Fabric, to hook up with their cloud, SaaS and community suppliers, Danskine mentioned the corporate at all times recommends configuring two bodily ports.
“Companies can rely on these for additional resiliency when connecting to thousands of global end points or their own IT infrastructure on Platform Equinix,” Danskine mentioned. “Companies can create interconnected business continuity and disaster recovery scenarios that meet their needs.”
What can companies do to maximise their cloud resilience?
Cloud and information centre uptimes are near 100%. Equinix has a worldwide uptime of >99.9999% throughout 250 information centres, whereas AWS permits 99.999% availability. But there are methods clients can mitigate the chance of a knowledge centre outage outdoors of relying on their suppliers’ uptime.
Use geographical range
Geographical range is a foundational design characteristic of recent cloud providers and ought to be thought of essential for all vital infrastructure. Like the a number of availability zones on provide inside AWS areas, this unfold of geographic threat might be through a number of information centres, mapping an software to a number of cloud areas or deploying the workload through containers.
Seek out community redundancy
A redundant community can assist full operations throughout a service disruption and allow in-flight upkeep. Equinix mentioned companies ought to guarantee redundancies in particular person community parts complement one another and the general design, in order that if an outage does happen, it could trigger minimal influence whereas restoration efforts are underway.
Ensure common planning and testing
Equinix argues common testing is vital. It exams vital techniques each two weeks underneath most load and performs an annual “dark site test,” the place it deliberately disconnects websites from major energy to make sure backup techniques come up and carry out as anticipated. Forrester additionally recommends revisiting the chance and continuity components of cloud methods.
Adopt a hybrid multicloud technique
Increasingly, organisations are pursuing cloud-agnostic digital infrastructure to attain benefits like innovation, cost-efficiency and resilience. Pairing a number of clouds with cloud-adjacent on-premises environments can present companies with essential safety and enterprise continuity advantages, constructing in additional resilience for organisations.
SEE: Discover the whole lot you have to find out about multicloud and hybrid cloud.
Utilise a managed service
AWS provides a lot of managed providers that permit organisations to function inside and throughout the area with no need to architect for multi-AZ traits themselves. With AWS caring for this by default, if there’s a problem inside a specific AZ, will probably be dealt with on the client’s behalf as a part of a shared duty mannequin.
The way forward for cloud to maintain clients agile and resilient
Recent information centre outages is not going to gradual cloud methods. Danskine argues hybrid multicloud is changing into the structure of alternative for a lot of as a result of it’s a versatile infrastructure technique. And in response to the fifth annual Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index, respondents in Australia anticipate to extend their use of this mannequin greater than fivefold to 43% penetration by 2026.
“This approach provides the flexibility to choose between public and private clouds, optimising performance and cost-efficiency,” Danskine mentioned. “It also enhances resilience through redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities and enables compliance with regulatory requirements in the host country, ensuring data security and sovereignty.”
Nam Je Cho from AWS mentioned there isn’t any doubt the area is “in the middle of a tectonic shift to the cloud. The number one reason that our customers are moving and innovating on the cloud is the agility and speed with which they can change their customer experience.”