I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
Its cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all
- Joni Mitchell, “Both Sides Now”
A lot of customers of amazon.com’s much-hyped Simple Storage Service (S3) were probably singing that song back on July 20th when (as reported by Information Week, among others) problems with “internal system communications” took S3 off line for eight hours. Worse yet, this was the third such outage in the company’s flagship “cloud computing” application.
What, you never heard of “cloud computing”? There's a respectable definition on Wikipedia, but essentially it's another form of outsourcing in which traditional corporate IT functions like data storage are made available by a third party as a service. The idea is that your company connects to the provider's network via the Internet - traditionally represented by a cloud graphic on network diagrams and PowerPoint sales presentations - and the provider takes care of all the nuts and bolts for you.
Launched in 2006, S3 was sold as a reliable alternative to big, power-hungry server farms.It was especially attractive to small businesses with big storage needs like SmugMug, ElephantDrive, Jungle Disk and others. Now some of them may be starting to wonder if trusting a critical business function to the vagaries of the Internet and Amazon's internal network was such a great idea after all.
This, of course, is the whole problem with cloud computing - to say nothing of Web 2.0, Software as a Service (SaaS), and all the other trends that involve sending your critical data off into a black box over which you have no control and about which you don't really know all that much. Sure, you've got a service level agreement. But how much does that mean when, as in the case of S3, the only way you can apply for a credit for the outage is via email? And how much is that credit worth, anyway, if your important data was unavailable for an entire business day? Are you really saving money if your storage isn't 100% reliable?
Sometimes you get what you pay for.
