Drawing an analogy between a microwave oven and cloud – Part 3

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In my previous posts (Part 1, Part 2), I compared the sensor and auto cook functionality of microwave with auto scaling in cloud and discussed the agility and adaptability provided by a cloud. In this part of the series, I compare additional aspects: reliability, multiple devices, compliance and acceptable use.

Reliability

A microwave oven can be a major time saver in the kitchen. You expect a microwave oven with certain wattage to reliably heat or cook the same amount of food in the same time period every time you use it. How reliable is the cloud? Co-resident virtual machines on a hypervisor in a cloud may negatively affect the performance of one another in the case of high input/output (I/O) usage or overcommitted resources.

You need a reliable cloud service provider that can guarantee service level and up time. This will require redundancy of power, servers, storage, connectivity, cooling and multiple data centers in different geographies. Standard service level agreement (SLA) offerings are measured in percentages; the more comprehensive the SLA, the higher the cost of the service. The SLA may also come with a money-back or similar type of guarantee.

You may be surprised that 99 percent uptime could mean more than three and half days of yearly downtime. A 99.99 percent uptime means less than an hour of yearly downtime. Many service providers do not count downtime caused by planned maintenance into their uptime numbers.

Multiple geographies and multi-cloud

Many businesses have multiple microwave ovens shared by the employees. This is like a public cloud because it is shared. It would be considered private by the business, since no one from outside the business would normally use them.

What is public in one context may be private in another. Some homes have more than one microwave. Most would consider this like a private cloud even though it is shared by the members of the family. You can use two microwaves simultaneously, either to reduce the cooking time or to provide for two separate cooking requests in the family. One microwave may be low wattage, another high. You might just get into the habit of using one over the other for separate purposes depending on where they are placed or how long you have been using them.

Similarly, in a cloud you can have your compute and storage needs hosted on multiple pods, regions or geographies. This also allows redundancy, high availability and failover capability. It allows you to serve clients based on their proximity to the requests. You can have your application deployed in a hybrid cloud that can span on premises and also off premises between multiple cloud providers. Multi-cloud allows sharing workloads across multiple cloud providers. Based on the cost, service time, SLA and outages, customers can decide to rely on a particular cloud. Open standards enable applications to move between different cloud environments. The multi-clouds storage toolkit uses the resilience of multiple clouds to offer stronger protection against service outages and data loss. Multi-clouds require more thinking around security and governance.

Compliance

There are performance standards for microwave radiation. To ensure that microwave ovens are safe, manufacturers are required to certify that their microwave oven products meet the strict radiation safety standard created and enforced by the FDA. Similarly, regulations hold companies accountable for protecting their sensitive information in a cloud.

For example, look at the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations, Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance and Service Organization Controls (SOC 2) certification for data protection and availability. You may have an on-premises deployment of cloud and manage everything in house due to compliance requirements. Organizations with certification and compliance requirements such as HIPAA and PCI DSS may request and leverage the Softlayer SOC 2 Type II report as part of their compliance strategy. Global Load Balancer allows you to load balance your websites between servers in different physical data center locations, redirecting users to the nearest data center location. However, EU data protection laws ban transfer of personal data outside the European Economic Area. Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act 2000 (PIPEDA) stipulates that organizations remain responsible and accountable for personal information they control.

Cloud providers are very tempting targets for attackers. Cloud specific threats control the fates of a large number of cloud customers and an even larger number of individual users. Insider threats pose a security risk to clients. Compliance and even encryption of data is not sufficient to guarantee against data breaches. Data breaches make a huge impact on brand reputation, requiring organizations to place a greater emphasis on cyber threat intelligence.

Acceptable use

Microwave radiation can heat body tissues the same way it heats food with non-ionizing radiation. A microwave manual warns you not to put metal in the microwave to prevent arcing. If generated microwaves don’t get absorbed, it can damage the magnetron and render the microwave unsafe or useless. Similarly, an acceptable use policy prohibits certain uses of cloud. You should be aware of such policies and agreements that are consistent with the laws and regulations governing use of the Internet and protecting the right of customers.

Microwave ovens have simplified our lives to a great extent. There are, however, some things you should not heat in a microwave oven. Cloud computing promises lower cost of ownership and almost limitless scalability, but that doesn’t mean everything should be ported or run in a cloud. Some applications will be ideal candidates to be ported to a cloud platform. You need to be aware of hidden costs of hosting solutions in the cloud. I hope this analogy with microwave ovens clarifies some aspects of clouds and increases the awareness and information to enable you to make informed choices. Engage in the conversation with me by commenting below or on Twitter @aakarve.