Word in defense of OVH

Last week OVH data centers in Strasbourg burned down. Some discussions were produced more heat than the fire itself. Opinions were different: some claimed that OVH lied about its reliability, others - canceled the cloud/OVH/IT as a whole.

Clear minds recalled the words of Eric Schmidt (if I dont mind) about a cloud being just someone else's computer. It doesnt matter where the cloud is hosted in private DC or providers: anything can burn and sink. Furthermore - power outage, connectivity goes down, etc.

As for me, two events at once happened last Wednesday: one for OVH and another for Europe. With the first all is clear, and the second a warm welcome to the club. Clouds outages happened in Australia (several times already) and in the US. It was no such kind of disaster of data centers in other regions, or such didn`t get a lot of attention. Moreover, news from far-far away is not so interesting.

Everyone is used to the outages of AWS and Azure. Google also breaks something from time to time. And any mention about the BGP leakage is a bad manner cause since it`s daily life for a long time already.

Architects and IT professionals also were outrage about OVH’s design and the entire DC project. The concern is about a modular design and fire-hazardous solutions. All in all, it’s bad. Some local providers immediately declared that their data centers do not burn in the fire, and they do not sink in the water. It`s like since there were no such accidents, the opposite is not proven.

And for some reason, as many as 4 availability zones or sub-data centers were placed physically on the same site! Can you imagine?! But there are two points: initially Azure regions were physically in the same data center and, optionally, shared power and network, and AWS is doing so now with its Local Region.

I recall one situation with a customer who had to choose a cloud to run managed DB. The first CSP had a multi-AZ design, and the second - higher SLA, but without multi-AZ. It was a long discussion about which one is better and more important…

Everything falls, and no clouds will change it. All AWS guides and best practices mention that the service has to be designed to handle a failure of the underlying cloud infrastructure. Twenty years ago, people were divided into those who make backups and those who don’t (since then, though, nothing has changed a lot). I hope this event will show the need to store copies outside. For example, the Veeam (backup vendor) almost from its very beginning delivers a message about the 3-2-1 rule (three copies, two media, one copy on another platform). Modern technologies make this process even easier than 5 or 10 years ago.

P.S. small prediction that some of the service providers will provide a service to audit/guarantee data security on remote site in case of such accidents.