Rational Survivability

Sung to the tune of Don McLeans “American Pie”

A long, long time ago…
I could launch an instance
How that AMI used to make me smile
And I knew if I needed scale
that I’d avoid that fail whale
though I knew that I was in denial

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But April 20 made me shiver
Amazon did not deliver
Bad news – oh what a mess
auto-cloning E B S…

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I can’t remember if I cried
when the status dashboard said East had died
Tried to take my VMs back inside
The day…Amazon died

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So bye-bye, my clustered AMIs
I tried to launch one
it just sat there, much to my surprise
And them angry devs were telling stories and lies
Singin’ “this public cloud I now despise
“this public cloud, I now despise.”

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The CFO’s got a look of love,
and his faith, all-in, with the clouds above,
Buy less servers, Werner tells you so…

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Do you believe in infinite scale
Can the cloud save your ass when it goes to hell
and can you teach me how to plan to fail?

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Well I know that ….you’re in love with scrum
that agile, mobile are your rules of thumb
You tried, those VMs to move
but with no RDS, you’re screwed…

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I was a lonely sysadmin with nothin’ to prove
until the cloud done fail, now the devs are screwed
and they didn’t know what quite to do..
the day…Amazon died…

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I started singin’
bye-bye, my clustered AMIs
I tried to launch one
it just sat there, much to my surprise
And them angry devs were telling stories and lies
Singin’ “this public cloud I now despise
“this public cloud, I now despise.”

…

Related articles

• The Day The Cloud Died (blogs.forbes.com)
• Was yesterday’s mess with Amazon EC2 enough to make you question cloud computing? (shortformblog.tumblr.com)
• What can we learn from Amazon’s cloud failure? (techflash.com)
• Amazon Black Thursday (and some of Friday) (alan.blog-city.com)