On Wednesday night, the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA), Security Community, hosted an event at the Attachmate offices in downtown Seattle, WA, on one startup companies experience with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud outage of April 21, 2011. Jeff Malek, co-founder of the Seattle-based virtual economy platform BigDoor Media, Inc., did a post-mortem presentation on the lessons BigDoor learned from the cloud outage at AWS.
According to Mr. Malek, the startup enterprise has strategic choices to make when determining whether to place their business concept in “the Clouds.” This is where the BigDoor’s self-described “Ruger Fault Equivalency” of “time equals money” enters into the equation. Coined after Mr. Malek’s lovable canine companion, Ruger, the Ruger Fault Equivalency is premised on a startup’s tolerance of factors associated with its overall enterprise risk management strategy. The theory postulates that a startup’s business development is willing to deal with a certain amount of risk so long as that risk yields to three (3) basic tenet’s: (1) Scripted Repeatability; (2) Single Point of Failure Elimination; and (3) Clear-cut communication.
Mr. Malek theorizes that the first two tenet’s are within the startup’s control, but that the third tenet is directly related to how the cloud provider, in BigDoor’s case – AWS, communicates with its clientele in the wake of a failure within the Clouds. In some instances, the service tickets BigDoor was issued by AWS was bumped up in priority after the failure occurred, and the site received intermittent outages for approximately 12 hours over the course of 4 days. However, AWS customer service representatives also communicated that there was a backlog on service tickets of 3 months.
AWS acknowledged in its post-mortem report that communications with its clientele could have been better, but overall, Mr. Malek is still a “fan” of the AWS business model. According to Mr. Malek, this is where the Ruger Fault Equivalency can help the startup enterprise mitigate risks associated with placing a business model solely in the Clouds. If time equals money, then the goal of an IT infrastructure in the Clouds should be to quickly leverage a proven operational foundation that is scalable, reliable, and secure.
If time equals money, then the goal of an IT infrastructure in the Clouds should be to quickly leverage a proven operational foundation that is scalable, reliable, and secure.”
The professional responsible for designing and managing a startup infrastructure in the Clouds should then go to work on eliminating any single points of failure, and take into consideration techniques related to “scripted repeatability” (which goes beyond the competency of the author of this blog). Based on the feedback from the audience during the Q&A portion of Mr. Malek’s presentation, the Ruger Fault Equivalency made logical sense, and the celebrity of Ruger was born. Brings a whole new meaning to “Cloud Computing is for the dogs.”