I wrote about the maturing cloud last month. So, along comes the amazon web services fiasco. But actually I am impressed with the realistic, mature assessment from many.
Will some Amazon customers pack up and leave? Will some of them swear off the cloud? Probably. But realistically, we’re talking about data centers, and infrastructure, here. They can and do fail. You have to architect your app to have continuous availability across multiple data centers, if it can never ever go down. Whether you’re running your own data center, running in managed hosting, or running in the cloud, you’re going to face this issue. (Your problems might be different — i.e., your own little data center isn’t going to have the kind of complex problem that Amazon experienced today — but you’re still going to have downtime-causing issues.)
Kevin Smith of BigDoor is cited in the New York Times about whey they did not spread backup and recovery services across multiple amazon regional data centers unlike Netflix has which has been far less affected . “There’s always a trade-off,” Mr. Smith said, noting the expenses and developer time that would have been required to do more.
Ah yes, the tradeoff.
While traditional hosters and outsourcers and on=premise software vendors gloat about the amazon issue, ask them how many hours their average customer is down in a regular week – for “planned” maintenance, and for unplanned. And how much more downtime when there is a major ERP and other major transaction processing application upgrade. When was the last time each of their customers ran a full-scale disaster recovery drill. And by the way how many times more expensive their services are - 5, 10, 20? times – compared to cloud options for that privilege.
PS – on the amazon web services website, the section on “media coverage” was last updated March 4. I sure hope they have the maturity to also showcase some of the less flattering press from this episode.
