Is the Cloud Resilient to Hot Days?

Is the Cloud Resilient to Hot Days?

And so, in Scotland, yesterday, we had the highest temperature ever. I know that some people will smile, but it achieved 35 deg C in Edinburgh. Overall, it was lovely/horrible (please delete as required). I love the weather in Scotland, as you really appreciate a nice day — and there’s always the weather that you love coming along soon. But, is the UK setup for this heatwave? Well, the trains stopped running for a day, and people were told to stay at home.

But what about our other critical infrastructure — the Cloud? Well, Google and Oracle’s cloud had problems related to cooling their servers, and where they had to power off many servers as they were in danger of overheating. My advice is to perhaps consider locating more data centres in Scotland, but that’s for another article. And so when the machines are powered-off, it means that the virtual machines that are running on these machines will need to migrate to other ones. This often causes performance issues, and where the running machines fill up their memory or overall their processors.

Oracle eventually posted [here]:

Google, too, had cooling problems in their europe-west2-a data centre in London, and with higher errors rates and service outages:

Conclusions

Data centres need to be cooled, otherwise, servers will keep getting hotter, and eventually shut themselves off. A good Cloud architect makes sure that virtual machines are migrated before this happens, but it might not always work, so there is a risk of damage to your data and services. And, so, resilience must be a core part of every company, and plans should be put in place for short-term and longer-term migration of service provision, as a failure to do so, might damage a company or its brand — or even worse, lead to a loss of life.