…but it will do.
The details are somewhat sketchy, but it looks like an FBI raid over the ne’er-do-wells at LulzSec at hosting provider DigitalOne got a little over enthusiastic, grabbing several RACKS of servers instead of several servers (or one). You can read the news here, here and here. Several legitimate customers were taken offline and are still struggling to get back to work.
What if these customers, including LulzSec, had hosted their servers in a cloud farm? Would the FBI then have seized the entire data center? Possibly, but at the very least the workloads could have been moved dynamically to another compute cluster without disruption. That of course begs the question of “what then?” Since no public cloud provider has unlimited compute capacity (or distributed facilities) it would be a trivial matter to simply knock out every asset they own at the routers.
Still, customers running virtual machines in this case could theoretically have moved the workload or at least have implemented a much faster disaster recovery plan than what they are suffering through now. Rebuilding a server from scratch is no way to go through life, son.
Is this what we should come to expect? I’m curious whether the EFF will have anything to say about the incident. For my part, until more details emerge I think we should be worried about the FBI’s ability to police these sorts of things. If they decide to pull the trigger on a drug raid 4 doors down, should I be concerned they will include my house in the fracas, too?
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