There's been a lot written about the Amazon outage over the last week and the outage's impact on the "FUD" (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) factor regarding embracing the cloud. Amazon's blow by blow explanation of what happened provides a glimpse at how complex Amazon 's EBS architecture is.
IVA has been in the online service business since the late 90's and we've evaluated and used various 3rd party hosting solutions as our company has grown. We operated our own server farms for a number of years and know first-hand about the issues involved in providing our clients with great service. About 18 months ago, IVA made the commitment to moving to the cloud. Here's a short breakdown of why the cloud architecture makes sense for IVA., and why you can continue to be confident in us.
Reliability - The reality is that there are outages in any environment whether you run your own data center, use a 3rd party hosting service or run your applications in the could. That's why IVA plans for redundancy. That's why we have emergency plans. That's why we build our applications with fault tolerance. Anyone who has to manage servers knows that "stuff happens" and it's impossible to handle every outage even in the most complex architectures like Amazon EBS/EC2. We try for the 'sweet spot' between planning for (and paying for) redundancy while keeping our service cost effective.
Scalability - The ability to increase capacity by double, triple or 100 fold is the main reason many companies decide to move to the cloud. Our industry and customer base have experienced rapid growth more than once (think mobile phone usage), so we need the ability to grow as our customer base grows. Plus we have the ability to handle entertainment events that happen (often unscheduled) without a hiccup.
If I had to make a decision to migrate to the cloud or host our own solution today, even after all the buzz around the Amazon outage, I would make the same choice. It's proven to be right for us, and right for our clients.
- Bob Kolo
Vice President Technology
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