According to the survey conducted by Markley Cloud Services solution, 48% of respondents use cloud services directly or indirectly. This figure is expected to reach 82% in the next 3 years. That being said about the usage, lets ponder a bit on what happens when such services are interrupted? Imagine your hyperbolic reaction when the web page pops up an error, “Sorry! This Service is not available!”
Well, cloud computing is still in the blooming phase and services haven’t been utilized to their fullest. Also, currently no cloud service provider guarantees 100% uptime. Even big players like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Amazon are no exceptions in that list. So, it is a good time to give a thought about such what if scenarios. The likelihood of downtime will be on the cards the day demands explodes to the point where servers hosting the service can no longer cope with the requirement.
In this blog post, let me share my thoughts for handling such a crisis point. First, on a positive note, the cloud is scalable and so few of the outages can be predicted if the services are periodically monitored.
Consider an example of a client service hosted through a cloud vendor. The client decides to offer a 50% discount on its products to increase the business demand. This then increases the inflow of orders. Well, in this predictable scenario, with new customers likely to take up the offer, the cloud vendor can monitor the services and be prepared to meet the sporadic demand.
On the downside, any service downtime can’t be predicted. Let us assume that a popular client service goes down and that this results in people switching to a competing client service, which may not have been anticipated by the concerned client.
Now to address this scenario from a different perspective, let’s consider Customer, Cloud vendor and Client service to be vertices of a triangle.
Cloud services
The vertices, Cloud vendor and Client service must be in phase to meet the demands of the customer. If not, the triangle may topple down. The Cloud vendor and Client service must plan for a potential crisis phase based on which the cloud vendor allocates 10% of the total available resources, exclusively for crisis management. This means that for service utilization, we fix the saturation point at 90% with the remaining 10% acting as threshold. If the sales and marketing team utilize 90% of the resources, the client would then reach saturation point. In this case, they will make use of the remaining 10% of resources and also scale it up with more allocation of resources based on the requirement.
Cloud services
One other thing we need to focus is the aspect of transparency. In our example, if the cloud vendor isn’t aware of the discount offered by the Client service, how we can expect it to deliver on the SLAs ? Hence, transparency between the cloud vendor and the client service is necessary for the demand to be calculated in order to scale up the resources accordingly.
Hence if the “Scalable” factor is fine tuned and services are maintained in a transparent manner, there are practical possibilities for us to be able to handle the crisis scenario covered here.
