Entire Cloud Deleted

Web based app data storage company FlexiScale had to shut down the entirety of it's service after a cloud engineer deleted an entire cloud. Here's what happened:

Following last month's much-discussed Amazon S3 outage, most (if not all) of XCalibre's FlexiScale cloud went dark on Tuesday, and nearly two days later, the UK-based hosting outfit has yet to restore service.

According to XCalibre CEO Tony Lucas, the outage has affected "a vast majority" of businesses relying on FlexiScale for on-demand storage, processing, and/or network bandwidth.

Lucas won't say how many cloud-happy outfits depend on his cloud, which went live in October. But he expects some of them will be back up and running this evening UK time. "And other customers will start coming back online from there on," he says. "But we're not sure how long that will take."

As Lucas explained in an email to customers - posted to the Web by CNet - the outage occurred when an XCalibre engineer accidentally deleted one of FlexiScale's main storage volumes. "The problem was caused by human error," Lucas told us. "We've been having some capacity issues - FlexiScale has been growing at about 30 per cent a month in terms of usage. We've been adding capacity and adding capacity and we were in the process of adding even more, when one of the engineers who was tidying things up on the disk architecture made a mistake."

The cons of clouds:
- Web 2.0 runs on a lot of extra money (it ain't free - you pay for services you already have [or should have] locally)
- If a cloud fails (God forbid, electronics still have flaws), you're screwed. Amazon EC2
went down, and all I got was this lousy email:

There was a bad hardware failure. Hope you backed up your shit.

Look at it this way: at least you don't have a tapeworm.

-The Amazon EC2 Team

Interesting to note, the U.S. DoD plans to move almost all of it's military computing to an HP cloud system. HP doesn't have half the experience in cloud engineering that Google has, and will certainly make a killing off the deal. Meanwhile, vast amounts of top secret intelligence will be stored and accessed remotely. What a great idea. The administration is really out thinking itself now. "We have lots and lots and lots of data... let's put it all in a cloud controlled by Hewlett Packard. Heh heh!"

There's no reason to worry about DDoS attacks or DNS hacking in the event of global war, right?
Also, the troops need more gear to lug around.
They'll all be cybernetic soon anyway.