dotCloud dotGone: Ex-Docker PaaS passes away amid bankruptcy Platform-as-a-service upstart dotCloud will shut down next month after its parent Cloud Control filed for bankruptcy. Just a few hours ago, an email was sent to dotCloud users warning them that the service will end on February 29, along with a link to instructions on how to migrate their data. For those wondering if the …
Not even space? I'm not being sarcastic - I'm thinking CoLo.
People have been outsourcing the physical hosting of their servers along with associated power, cooling and network backbone services in third party data centers for decades. If one of them suddenly blinked out of existence then re-locating all that computing hardware would arguably be a bigger headache than just porting data somewhere else.
Doesn't happen often with CoLos of course because there is a tangible asset involved (the DC) and that gets sold on as a going concern. "Cloud" can be fragile because there are too many entirely virtual outfits with no tangible assets backing them up. That's fundamentally from the AWS and Azure cloud propositions.
A few years back, when people were building bit barns with wild abandon, several of those with the most-obviously-hopeless business cases went bust without warning or any prospect of being taken over as a going concern. One of the first hurdles their hapless customers faced was proving to the receivers that they actually owned the kit and were entitled to remove it elsewhere. At least in this case, the customers have been given some notice.
Being dependent on one external supplier for anything is always a risk...
That hasn't crossed my path personally, but I don't doubt it has happened. Most CoLo users I deal with have redundancy so if a BigData Inc. DC goes down for any reason there's a HugeData Inc. hot standby which has to be at least 100 km away.
The point I'm making is this isn't really about cloud vs. CoLo vs. in house. It's about redundancy. People without DR plans get burned no matter where or how they implement their systems.
Spot on! However we arrange our infrastructure we are all unavoidably dependant on a host of third party services from the power grid to communications networks to payment processors et cetera. If we forget the word cloud and replace it with internet, we are of necessity all using it. Having a bunch of servers in your own data centre is only the tiniest piece of the jigsaw.
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