Cloud Thoughts

As a T-Mobile customer, I was surprised that I had not been notified of this big outage event a few weeks ago and at the found out in the news. Being at home, there was no impact to me - I am guessing T-Mobile decided it was not worth sending out a notification to the customer base when infact most would never know for the same reason. So it was interesting to read their explanation of what caused this outage. Lot of companies are in a race to move everything they can to cloud these days. Once they can get going on this journey (which could be harder for some than others), its a race to complete the job. They want to trust the cloud providers to be better providers of infrastructure than their capabilities in-house. 

The lure of the Easy Button is tremendously powerful along with the desire to abdicate responsibility. If a bank experienced the kind of outage that T-Mobile did and their data was being managed by a cloud vendor, they have that one throat to choke. Back in the day, it would be a all hands of deck trying to find that throat. More often than not it would be many reasons leading up to such mishap and fixing it for good would be a herculean effort. The reputation impact would be squarely on the bank itself. With the cloud model all of that changes and the vendor will need to take the fall. No matter who blames whom, ultimately, the customer holds the bag.