The high cost of disaster avoidance
In this chapter we are going to talk extensively about what to do after there has been a disaster. Throughout this book we consider ways to avoid disaster. Something that is easy to overlook is that there is a cost to protecting our workloads against failures and that we have to weigh that against the cost of the failure itself combined with the likeliness that that disaster will even happen.
Too often we are told, or it is implied that disasters are to be avoided at all costs. This is crazy and should never be the case. Disaster avoidance has a cost, and that cost can be quite high. The disaster itself will have a cost and while that cost might be quite high, it is not always.
The risk that we take is that the cost of avoiding a disaster is sometimes greater than the cost of the disaster itself. There was a time when it was common for companies to spend tens of thousands of dollars on fault tolerant solutions to protect workloads whose common...