Dump Your Cloud Before Your Cloud Dumps You Hey, You, Get off of My Cloud! A CTO's Guide to the Unanticipated Risk
Alan Nekhom · 2021
In early 2021, some cloud providers took extraordinary measures to shut down businesses hosted on their platforms for various non-business-related reasons. This sent a shockwave through the tech industry. If a 2.2 million user platform could be snuffed out due to the posts of one person, what could this mean to all other businesses? One business was down for 6 weeks, and as of 5 months later had still not completely recovered. This exposed an unanticipated risk--being de-platformed for reasons beyond a business's reasonable predictability. During this time, I was given a charter from my CEO--come up with a plan that would result in us potentially being down for 6 minutes (or less!) rather than 6 weeks if the same thing were to happen to us. This paper is that plan and we share it freely so others can plan for the unanticipated risk of being kicked out of a cloud.