If the cloud falls it has to do with the people who are responsible for it. How could it be otherwise. Finally, the systems do not program or configure on their own. And even if it means „No cloud without automation“ you have to say „(No cloud without automation) without human skills“. In particular, we see our human weaknesses in the cloud when an outage occurs. Especially this year, we have seen a few of them.

People make mistakes

And that’s ok. As long as we are learning from those mistakes. What at one or the other vendors was not the case this year. I will not mention any names here, because those certainly know itself that they need to do something much better. But if an emergency generator does not work twice and also all emergency plans fail, something is wrong!
Although this failure, I am writing about, was not primarily a human error. Because against a hurricane and storm we are helpless. But the cascade of failures that happened during the storm is inexplicable.

Other errors that have happened this year, can be assigned directly to the people. On the one hand we had for example misconfigured network interfaces which ensure that the vendor networks were flooded with data and have therefore set themselves checkmate. Or a provider recently changes the configuration of the load balancer, which led to a prolonged outage.

Like I said, people make mistakes. And therefore one should not always blame „the big bad cloud“, but rather look behind the facade and keep in mind that there are just sitting humans like you and I.

Along these lines, let’s have a better 2013. 🙂