{"id":205,"date":"2020-09-09T14:37:43","date_gmt":"2020-09-09T14:37:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/box5442.temp.domains\/~arpioio\/?p=205"},"modified":"2020-09-09T14:37:43","modified_gmt":"2020-09-09T14:37:43","slug":"what-does-disaster-recovery-mean-in-the-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arpio.io\/staging\/8013\/what-does-disaster-recovery-mean-in-the-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"We’re in the cloud. So we’re covered. Right?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When we tell people about how Arpio fully automates disaster recovery for the AWS cloud, we\u2019re commonly asked the same question.<\/p>\n

\u201cWait.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t that built into the cloud?\u201d<\/p>\n

You can be forgiven if you asked it too.\u00a0 Cloud platforms provide a lot of built-in redundancy, and it can be easy to assume they\u2019ve got it all covered.\u00a0 But in the end of the day, the major cloud providers leave it to you to mitigate the most critical disasters.<\/p>\n

Understanding your D.R. needs for your cloud-based workloads requires assessing normal IT risks with a cloud-specific lens.\u00a0 In this blog post, we\u2019ll do just that.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s revisit some cloud disasters from the recent past\u2026<\/h4>\n

Luckily, disasters in the cloud (just like disasters in life) aren\u2019t a daily occurrence.\u00a0 But they happen frequently enough that most cloud practitioners can tell you a story about one they\u2019ve experienced themselves.\u00a0 Here are a couple of stories that we like to tell.<\/p>\n

AZURE SOUTH CENTRAL REGION OUTAGE<\/h5>\n

The South Central region of Microsoft Azure is located in the vicinity of San Antonio, TX.\u00a0 On September 4th, 2018, they had some pretty impressive weather in San Antonio, and a lightning strike took out power to this Azure region.<\/p>\n

Normally, power outages at data centers aren\u2019t the end of the world \u2013 they have backup generators that automatically kick in.\u00a0 But the lightning strike surged power through the data center\u2019s cooling systems, and they were fried. Temperatures in the datacenter got hot.\u00a0 Too hot. Hardware failures started happening. Microsoft decided they needed to shut everything down.<\/p>\n

It took 24 hours for Microsoft to repair the damage and to start bringing services back online.\u00a0 Some services weren\u2019t restored for 3 days.<\/p>\n

AWS NORTHERN VIRGINIA REGION OUTAGE<\/h5>\n

On February 28, 2017, an Amazon employee was performing a routine maintenance operation when he accidentally typo\u2019d a command.\u00a0 With that one mistake, he took down a massive number of servers supporting Amazon\u2019s Simple Storage Service (S3).<\/p>\n

S3 is a foundational service in AWS.\u00a0 When S3 doesn\u2019t work, a lot of other services don\u2019t work too.\u00a0 This outage cascaded throughout AWS in that region, significantly impacting thousands of workloads.\u00a0 It was so bad that Amazon\u2019s status page (where they report service outages) didn\u2019t work for several hours.\u00a0 You had to go to Twitter to learn what was going on.<\/p>\n

Restoring service required a complete reboot of the S3 system, which takes hours.\u00a0 Altogether, AWS\u2019s Northern Virginia Region was significantly impaired for 5 hours. And since this is the largest region of AWS, much of the internet was broken for that time.\u00a0 Estimates after the event claimed $250 million in economic damage.<\/p>\n

CODE SPACES<\/h5>\n

Code Spaces was once an up and coming competitor to GitHub.\u00a0 Until an attacker gained access to their AWS account, and demanded a ransom.\u00a0 When Code Spaces decided to play hardball, the attacker deleted all of their data.\u00a0 And all of their backups.<\/p>\n

It turns out, it\u2019s pretty hard to have business continuity when you have lost all of your data.\u00a0 Code Spaces closed up shop the very next week.<\/p>\n

The architecture of the cloud<\/h4>\n

It\u2019s tempting to think about the cloud as some ephemeral thing that exists in the ether.\u00a0 But in actuality, it\u2019s just servers that live in real data centers in physical locations on our planet.<\/p>\n

All 3 of the major public cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google) operate services in geographic areas they call \u201cregions.\u201d\u00a0 Most of these regions consist of multiple \u201cavailability zones,\u201d which you can roughly think of as distinct data centers in the region.<\/p>\n

The services provided by these clouds are either zonal, regional, or global.<\/p>\n

A zonal service is hosted within a given availability zone, and is therefore vulnerable to an outage within that availability zone (i.e. fire in the data center).<\/p>\n

A regional service spans availability zones within a region, and is therefore not vulnerable to an outage of a single availability zone.\u00a0 But it is vulnerable to an outage of multiple availability zones in the region (i.e. earthquake, regional power grid outage).<\/p>\n

And as you\u2019ve undoubtedly surmised, a global service is not vulnerable to a single regional outage.\u00a0 You\u2019d need multiple regions to fail to bring it down.<\/p>\n

In general, low-level infrastructure services (like virtual machines and virtual hard drives) are zonal.\u00a0 Higher-level platform services (like hosted databases) are often regional. And global services are pretty rare (they\u2019re really hard to engineer).<\/p>\n

So, to understand what kind of disasters you\u2019ve mitigated, you need to understand the architecture of the cloud services you\u2019re consuming and what they\u2019ve already mitigated for you.\u00a0 If you\u2019re consuming a zonal service (for example), it doesn\u2019t mean your application isn\u2019t resilient to an availability zone outage. It just means you have to build that resilience yourself \u2013 it\u2019s not automatic.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t forget about the cyber threats<\/h4>\n

Remember the story about Code Spaces?\u00a0 It didn\u2019t matter whether they were deployed across multiple availability zones or regions when the attacker decided to delete all of their data.<\/p>\n

The disaster wasn\u2019t an outage \u2014 it was catastrophic data loss. And since their backups were part of the data loss, they had no path to recovery.<\/p>\n

Most organizations work hard to ensure that they aren\u2019t vulnerable to an attacker gaining access to their accounts.\u00a0 But search online for \u201caws account hacked<\/a>\u201d and you\u2019ll find countless stories where it has happened.\u00a0 An in-depth approach to security requires that you always lock down your backups just in case.<\/p>\n

How do you know if you\u2019re covered?<\/h4>\n

Assessing your readiness for a cloud disaster boils down to answering 3 simple questions.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. If our cloud provider suffers an extended outage of an availability zone, are we still available? If not, how would we recover?<\/li>\n
  2. If our cloud provider suffers an extended outage of multiple availability zones (or an entire region), are we still available? If not, how would we recover?<\/li>\n
  3. If an attacker gains access to our cloud account, could they corrupt (i.e. ransomware) or delete our data and our backups?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If your answers to these questions are satisfactory for your business needs, you\u2019re mostly good.\u00a0 You just need to answer one more question\u2026<\/p>\n

    Have we tested it?<\/em><\/p>\n

    About Arpio<\/h4>\n

    Arpio is comprehensive disaster recovery for AWS so that you don\u2019t have to build it yourself.\u00a0 We pick up where Amazon leaves off, making it easy and fast to recover from any AWS outage or from any cyber attack on your AWS infrastructure.<\/p>\n

    Learn more at www.arpio.io<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    When we tell people about how Arpio fully automates disaster recovery for the AWS cloud, we\u2019re commonly asked the same question. \u201cWait.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t that built into the cloud?\u201d You can…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":206,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","content-type":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-blog"],"yoast_head":"\nWe're in the cloud. So we're covered. 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