How I would run a cloud service

Posted on December 19th, 2009

So Rackspace had troubles at one of its datacenters today. It took down a few major websites including TechCrunch. This got me thinking about how I would run a cloud service.

What I would do is have super high-end Internet pipes that would connect all my datacenters together. Each datacenter would have the exact same data. That means if one datacenter gets taken out, the others will be able to keep everything up. Kind of like server clustering. I would refer to this network of Internet pipes pumping huge amounts of bandwidth between all the datacenters as “SkyNet”. The service would be called “Brandon’s SkyNet”.

brandon_skynet

Who could resist a hot new cloud service called that? Eventually, “SkyNet” would be self-sustaining. Eventually, it could think and do whatever it wanted. I could then take lots of vacations while “SkyNet” did it’s thing. And no one’s blog hosted on “SkyNet” would ever go down!

Oh, wait…

Ok sarcasm aside, there has got to be a better way to do redundancy for a cloud service spanning multiple datacenters in different geological locations. Redundancy is key. If one datacenter goes down, something should kick in that keeps the services and websites up and running. While I was being funny about the whole “SkyNet” thing, I do think operating a service with datacenters as “nodes” isn’t such a bad idea. And when a note goes down, another one picks up the slack.