Can You Trust the Cloud?
I guess I've been a bit of a cloud advocate, but hopefully I imbue my prose with true notes of caution. This is one of those times.
Mission-critical apps require serious uptime, which is why IT clusters servers, has failover for virtual machines and spends a fortune on backup and restore. Cloud providers claim you needn't worry about all this, as their huge, efficient datacenters will take care of it all.
Not so fast. Amazon recently had major outages stemming from problems in its Northern Virginia datacenter. This left some customers without service for three full days!
The good news, if there is any good news, is that most Amazon clouds apps aren't mission-critical. Still, if my app was on that cloud, I'd find these outages pretty critical.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/26/2011 at 12:47 PM