Do we have the cloud infrastructure to handle a mass quarantine?

Question

The cloud is built on the premise that loads are significantly uncorrelated but in an emergency, all correlations go to one. Everyone is going to be clamoring for the same finite set of cloud resources and we're going to hit hard limits very quickly as the ability for the overall cloud to scale up in capacity is very limited.In your job, are you taking any steps right now to disaster plan for if you face significant restrictions on availability of cloud resources and simultaneously huge increases in demand?Do we have any lessons from China on how they handled their quarantine from an internet infrastructure perspective so we can share best practices and make sure we're ready?

PaulHoule · Accepted Answer

The flip side is that many kinds of business activity will drop. For instance, airlines will be consuming less computing resources. Some elite universities will be doing remote education, but in the end they will be doing less education.
Cloud providers also let out quite a lot of capacity at low prices on the spot market. I have trained neural networks at deep discounts and if capacity becomes tight for systems that are guaranteed to run, those low prices will go away.
I don't know about others, but AWS has support centers in many different places, if the epidemic hits different places at different times, they will always have support staff somewhere who are OK.
If anything is going to break it is going to be the access networks of residential service providers. We haven't seen "middle mile" underinvestment to be as much of a problem as it used to be, but if daytime load increases dramatically, you will see some internet providers get laggy for teleconferencing, ssh, ...

zelon88 · Answer

I saw this coming and avoided moving my infrastructure to the Cloud in the first place. It sounds insensitive, but "I told you so" sounds very satisfying. I mean nobody with 100% Cloud infra is really going to be surprised when some major world event destroys their data, right?Of course we haven't hit those limits yet and I'm sure the major players involved have failover/load balancing capabilities that we haven't even scratched the surface of yet. I honestly believe that this is not the Cloud-ending event that the world is destined for one day.

JohnFen · Answer

Fortunately, at my workplace the only reliance on cloud services we have is that we use O365. If that went down, it would be very inconvenient but not disastrous. The biggest problem would be email, of course, but we could switch to our backup email system within a day or so.