Amazon’s outage in third day: debate over cloud computing’s future begins
As Amazon’s web services outage passed its third day, the debate on the future of cloud computing is underway. The outage is costing web sites such as Reddit and Quora considerable losses as users turn elsewhere to get their social media needs met.
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service hosts thousands of major web sites that rely on it to serve pages to users. And users rely on these services to store their personal accounts and data remotely. So when the EC 2 service goes down, so do the web sites, and that means users can’t log in to access their data. It’s a big hiccup for an industry that is supposed to grow to $55 billion by 2014, according to market researcher IDC.
The duration of the outage has surprised many, since Amazon has a lot of backup computing infrastructure. If Amazon can’t safeguard the cloud, how can we rely on it? So the debate begins on the future of cloud computing and what to do to make users and companies put their trust in cloud vendors such as Amazon.
While painful, this is a healthy transition. Infrastructure as a Service is part of the IT toolkit, but requires a healthy does of risk assessment. Without signals that warn of risk, it's all to easy to collectively overcommit to an approach, and finish up with another textbook (sub-prime style) system collapse.
Startups (and resource constrained) have no choice but to accept limited redundancy or single points of failure, but enterprise computing requires that redundancy be designed into the system. This is the point made by George Reese of O'Reilly, overstated, but apt http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/04/the-aws-outage-the-clouds-shining-moment....
My view - this is part of our collectively learning the upsides, downsides, and rules of engagement for shared 'cloud' resources.
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