Reading "Elastician: Failure as a Feature" of cloud - I'm living It

A year ago, we started using Amazon cloud for a number of different projects.

It grew important enough, that we had to hire an administrator to help us deploy and manage it.

So there I am interviewing this very sharp guy and I have to tell him that cloud is different than colo-cation or hosting: instances fail or they get wobbly and you have to bug out of them with only a little notice.

Shock and horror ensued. He looked at me and said he hadn't had any down time for three years, and why don't we just get some cheap sun servers off eBay instead.

So we had a conversation that went something like this post from the Elastician.

What's wonderful and transformative about running your applications in public clouds like EC2 and CloudServers, etc. is not that the servers never fail but that when they do fail you can actually do something about it.  Quickly.  And programmatically.  From an operations point of view, the killer feature of the cloud is the API.  Using the API's, I can not only detect that there is a problem with a server but I can actually correct it.  As easily as I can start a server, I can stop one and replace it with a new one.

So add that hurdle to the other mental hurdles that will need to be broken on our way to cloud.