Episode Summary

iland Cloud Technologist Brian Knudtson is joined by guests Melissa Palmer, Justin Warren, and Chris Hildebrandt to finish the CloudBytes conversation on resiliency — how it should be considered and how the cloud can enhance it. They encourage everyone to remember to ABR. Always be recovering.

Panel

Cloud Conversations

Topic 1

[02:30] Not every disaster is the loss of a complete datacenter, how are customers using the cloud for partial disasters?

Topic 2

[08:31] There are many technologies that are currently in use for recovering to private, hyperscaler, or VMware-based clouds. What are some of the more popular options and what advantages do they offer customers?

Topic 3

[18:12] Beyond those specific tools, many applications, such as Microsoft SQL and Exchange, come with their own failover capabilities. For those who work with VDI and other specialized applications, let’s talk about where application-specific resiliency should be considered and how well they work in the cloud. 

Cloud Bites

[02:20] “Resiliency is a very important aspect of cloud design, and if it’s overlooked you’re going to have a bad time.” – Melissa Palmer

[06:56] “There’s a lot more pressure on developers to write code that understands how things can fail and deal with things when they fail.” – Justin Warren

[07:32] “The migration from hardware resiliency to software resiliency has massively changed the game as far as DR and failover.” – Chris Hildebrandt 

[08:52] “I always found it very important to have multiple copies of data, because stuff goes wrong constantly — everything breaks.” – Justin Warren

[09:25] “Try to partition things so the blast radius is smaller. So if something does go wrong, it doesn’t take everything off and you don’t have to have a full-site disaster.” – Justin Warren

[10:05] “Pen and paper is a technology.” – Justin Warren

[10:53] “Look at the full gambit, and it doesn’t just have to be stuff in computers. Talk to the humans and focus on what it is the humans need to do to continue to do their job.” – Justin Warren 

[12:22] “How much does that application actually make this company and does it really need to be up 100 precent of the time? – Melissa Palmer 

[16:45] “There’s nothing like a disaster to motivate money spend.” – Brian Knudtson 

[17:13] “Ransomware has been the best marketing campaign for backups that we have ever seen.” – Justin Warren 

[20:13] “Quantify the expense of running that application in a resilient mode. Is it worth the cost in time and money?” – Chris Hildebrandt 

[21:49] “It’s important to have an understanding of what makes up your application and how it works together. A lot of people don’t have that.” – Melissa Palmer