I read with interest today a blog post from Yaron Goland entitled Do I need to backup/journal my Windows Azure Table Store?
in which he spoke about the need to do exactly that i.e. Backup any data that you put into Windows Azure Table storage.
Yaron's assertion was not that we need to protect ourselves from Azure failures, instead he asserted that we have a need to protect ourselves from ourselves. He outlines three classes of mistakes that developers of apps that utilise Azure Table storage may (nay, will) make:
Yaron makes an important point; data backups don't just protect against hardware failure, they protect against application failure too. This has been true for years and there is nothing special about this new class of distributed, geo-redundant, super-resilient data storage services that make our tried-and-tested procedures any the less important hence the message is simple:
make sure your data is recoverable no matter what storage mechanism you are using
Having said all that cloud storage services such as Windows Azure Table storage do present somewhat unique opportunities for protecting us against failures. Yaron proposed what he termed a "journal" system which captures all PUT, POST & DELETE operations against a service:
I would like to have a journal that records
every command issued against the system ... then when I find out
about a data logic corruption bug caused by my front end I could at least try
to figure out which of my users was likely to be affected by reviewing the
journal
The very nature of Windows Azure Table storage (i.e. CRUD operations against a simple partition key/row key scheme) means that such a journaling system could (and argubly should) be provided by Windows Azure itself rather than being something that the application developer has to build themselves. The service could also provide the ability to "replay" all operations against a given partion key/row key since a specified point in time.
I have no idea whether the Windows Azure team or indeed any other cloud storage provider has contemplated offering such a service but I for one believe that it would be very valuable. What say you?
@Jamiet