A storm knocked out amazon's cloud service last night (2012-06-29) [1]. A whole lot of stuff on the internet got whacked. Especially annoying was Netflix - I wanted to watch a movie, and couldn't, for about five minutes.
It used to be that, for an organization, to experience this kind of disruption you needed your own data center. You had to pay out big bucks for servers, disk drives, electricity, staff.
Now all you gotta do is pay a lot of money to someone else. Progress!
Which isn't to say that I'm against the notion of 'cloud'. For some applications, it makes sense. For some organizations it's ideal.
But if you're gonna do it, you gotta recognize that you're outsourcing something real important, that the cloud provider is not nearly as interested in your data as you are.
And sometimes they're going to pull a fumducker and leave you hanging.
[1] I'm sure we're going to find out, in time, that it wasn't something simple like 'ran out of fuel for the generators' but a really-truly cascading error that jumped out of the fourth dimension to whack them hard. We've all been there.
It used to be that, for an organization, to experience this kind of disruption you needed your own data center. You had to pay out big bucks for servers, disk drives, electricity, staff.
Now all you gotta do is pay a lot of money to someone else. Progress!
Which isn't to say that I'm against the notion of 'cloud'. For some applications, it makes sense. For some organizations it's ideal.
But if you're gonna do it, you gotta recognize that you're outsourcing something real important, that the cloud provider is not nearly as interested in your data as you are.
And sometimes they're going to pull a fumducker and leave you hanging.
[1] I'm sure we're going to find out, in time, that it wasn't something simple like 'ran out of fuel for the generators' but a really-truly cascading error that jumped out of the fourth dimension to whack them hard. We've all been there.
