Comments on: Bummer 2.0

By: Risks in the Cloud | Oracle

Risks in the Cloud | Oracle — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:30:01 +0000

[...] want to be as safe and prepared as possible. For example, what if your social bookmarking provider loses all your data? What if your favorite lifestreaming app is bought by a huge social network? What [...]

By: Jake

Jake — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:08:05 +0000

Yeah, makes you wonder how many other little startups out there that are moderately successful are “at risk”. For example, I'm always a little more confident when I see they use AWS.

By: Andrew Sparks

Andrew Sparks — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:51:49 +0000

Classic case of being a victim of yr own success.
So even if they had competent DBA brains available from the start and assuming MySQL can cope with the volumes (probably) – explosive rate of growth can still nobble you (esp when yr backup reco strategy is um, um um…)

By: Jake

Jake — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:46:05 +0000

Sure, I get it. VMs are an option, albeit not the best one, but still. Didn't realize you were a Mac apologist.

By: Gary

Gary — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 09:21:17 +0000

“Heh, I wonder if he jumped from MySQL to Oracle after the fail.”
Not unless he was willing to ditch the Macs too.

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:03:57 +0000

Heh, I wonder if he jumped from MySQL to Oracle after the fail.

By: Andy C

Andy C — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:21:38 +0000

When you mentioned the mere possibility of $10m VC funding, I could have sworn I could hear three Exadata salesmen beating a path to Larry Halff's door !

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:15:38 +0000

Preach the backup gospel.

I agree fully that relying on the 'tubes is asking for trouble. As you say, even if failure doesn't get you, shuttering the service might.

Good thoughts, thanks.

By: Andy C

Andy C — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 03:21:35 +0000

An interesting post, I didn't use magnolia but I think it just goes to prove 'on the internet no-one knows you are a one-man band operating from your kitchen'.

Personally, I think Larry Hallf made a classic error – he didn't realise his areas of weaknesses. I think any half-decent MySQL DBA should have been able to assist with a resilient backup and recovery strategy for a database that was only a mere 500GB. I also suspect he could addressed the issue for a lot less than $10 million.

I use a lot of Web 2.0 services, primarily from Google and yes, they have occasional failures – Gmail was down this week for example – and although I get these services for 'free' as in no money, I increasingly worry about the price I am paying entrusting so much of my data to Google.

Of course, even Google with all their power, employees and expensive data centres, are not exempt from reviewing their portfolio of services – I was really disappointed when they recently decide to ditch Notebook although there are multiple export options to alternative services.

Basically, I don't entrust anything to the cloud that I couldn't afford to lose. Fr example, I store photos in Picasa but all my photos are also mastered on my hard drive. When did I last back them up to my external HD – why last October, of course