The Problem with Weddings and Funerals

I've always thought that two of the toughest industries to work in would be the wedding or the funeral business - not, however for the reason that most people complain about - which is dealing with people under vast amounts of stress. There are lots of industries that deal with people under stress (I'd say IT has it pretty bad as well, ever tried restoring two years of someone's work from a crashed hard drive?)

No - the problem facing people in the wedding and funeral industries is that their day-to-day task is dealing with people on some of the most important days of their life. Even the slightest slip-up on a couple's wedding day will sit as a stain in their memory for the rest of their lives. Similarly, any sort of mistake during a funeral will feel like it tarnishes the memory of a loved one whom everyone attending wished to honor.

This puts a lot of stress on workers in those industries as they need to be on their game 100% of the time, every day, or things can turn in an instant. Consistently going 4 for 5 would make you a god as a baseball player but will get you fired pretty quickly as a wedding planner.

What does this have to do with Web Development? Nothing really, and no, despite what some clients seem to believe I don't think a little downtime is the same as setting the cake cart on fire. What got me thinking about this issue was an interview I saw with Google's CEO on PBS and how any implementation of cloud computing should probably be tempered with a fallback.

If Google* only loses 10 people's data because of a failure of two of their redundant systems at the same time, out of their total of 10 million users that's a pretty good rate. Except for those ten people. They are going to be pissed and there probably won't be much they can do.

Just like your wedding, your data is a good deal more important to you than it is to anyone else. So while an engineer probably won't get fired because he spilled his coffee on the SAN that was storing your info ( "it only took 2 accounts out, we have 20 million here, it's not that big of a deal right?" ) you are going to be in for a headache.

Now the reason this is different than Bill in the next cubicle accidentally watering your PC along with his desk cactus is that as the name sort of implies - you have very little recourse or ability to try to fix any problems hovering around in the cloud. For google, the amount of lost revenue will be minimal and their EULA's and their stable of lawyers are going to protect them against any bigger issues, but for you, good luck getting that data back. If it was really important, your company would probably be willing to spend a few grand to get the data back from a data forensics team, but Google will most likely not be bothered to try to recover the data - it's just going to be gone and they aren't going to give you the hard drive to try to fix.

Now, even if you have the ultimate faith that Google will never screw up, imagine that a hacker guesses a password your admin used to access a service and replaces all your data with Uv_bn_haXored.txt - good luck getting Google to fish out a backup and restore your data. A couple of backup tapes at the CTO's house would have solved that problem.

So what to do, ignore the cloud? Of course not - the overall benefits far outweigh the downsides - just remember that you need to treat your valuable data with the same amount of care whether it's on the cloud or in your server room. Don't assume that it'll be taken care of.

As with anything where the outcome is orders of magnitude more important to you than to those providing a service for you - tread carefully and choose wisely. There's a reason no one goes with "AAA Wedding Planners" even if they are listed first in the phone book and offer the second wedding free.

Update 9/21:  Just saw this story and thought it illustrated the issues with going to a commodity service on the cloud quite well:  Whoops! Students 'Going Google' Get to Read Each Other's Emails - a 3-days response time while people can read each other's emails is lauded as as  "prompt response." Would that sort of thing be acceptable in the business world? 

* And by Google I mean any large company providing commodity level cloud services for cheap ( Amazon, Sun/Oracle, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc)