A Parachute Called Redundancy

Redundancy in most other contexts means expendable, extra, and oftentimes unnecessary.  However, as recent cloud outages have proven, redundancy is an extremely crucial feature for cloud computing.  Amazon's recent cloud outage has demonstrated how important its services are in our lives.  Although most of the articles and opinion pieces the past couple of weeks have been critical of Amazon and cloud computing, the key lesson from this is not "fear and sneer Amazon and the cloud."  Contrarily, this experience explicitly illustrates the importance of redundancy.

Netflix, for instance, also utilized Amazon's services but was unscathed from the outage.  They developed and implemented their own redundancy system in the cloud.  Though, Netflix's developers was candid about their frustrations with the process on their tech blog, their hard work paid off.  While other popular websites were down, Netflix continued to stream videos to their customers.

Redundancy is like a back up parachute.  It is designed to expect outages and take over operations seamlessly during those outages so that users would not be affected.  In addition to logistic features such as load balancing, ease of data migration, and useability, users should also ask their providers about guaranteed uptime and redundancy.  All other features are null if the servers are down.

Here's a fun video on the importance of having a functional parachute for those "just in case" moments.