Cloud Maintenance

Maintenance activities are a fact of life in any IT operation including cloud data centers. We have covered this subject throughout this book as it pertains to the various aspects of ongoing operations. This section will go a little deeper and explore the issues of maintenance operations and not the detailed technology maintenance requirements discussed earlier.

With the shared responsibilities between the cloud provider and customer, it is important to understand who is performing what maintenance when, and what the impact is going to be. With the highly redundant cloud data centers and an architecture designed for high availability, there are often maintenance activities that take place and have no impact on operations. If the cloud vendor is performing the maintenance, they will generally post the operation’s notice on their maintenance dashboard or send out notification e-mails to subscribers that outline the work to be done, the time frames, and what the...