For now cloud computing is still in it’s infancy and there are many out there who still have reservations especially when it comes to the level of control you have. In theory the cloud should be safer than your own servers sat next to you in your office and in reality there very rarely is any downtime. All the benefits of the cloud were strongly knocked last weekend when one of the biggest cloud hosts were knocked offline for several hours. Amazon sites all over Europe were down for around thirty minutes on Sunday night. Amazon’s sites are among the biggest ecom sites in the world and they’re hosted through Amazon’s own cloud service EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), this hosting is responsible for millions of other users all over the world being on the cloud too.
Two weekends before Christmas is not when you want your ecom site offline so if Amazon can’t keep themselves up and running what chance do cloud computing companies have? The crash was officially blamed on a hardware failure in a Ireland based data center. Those who may be a little more sceptical might be thinking about the whistle blowing site WikiLeaks and the anger by people that Amazon pulled their hosting for this site. Amazon are quite sure and eager to tell us these problems were just down to a problem in their data centers. Their Web Services were not affected the last time they experienced down time back in June 2010.
Unfortunately this week has had a detrimental effect on the reliability of cloud and virtualization technology in general. With a 99.95% service level Amazon have always said their cloud will only ever be down for around four and a half hours a year. However, this particular down time was not planned which is why it’s so discouraging. Now all that’s left to see is whether this incident could be enough to start putting the first of the nails in the cloud computing coffin before it had a chance to show us what it can do.
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