Storm’s-a-Brewin’: How Many Clouds Are You Going to Need?
For the second time in some months, Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service,) one of the most "invisibly visible" examples of the intersection of Web2.0 and cloud computing, has suffered some noticeable availability hiccups.
Or, if you prefer to use Amazon’s vernacular "elevated error rates" 😉
Many well-known companies such as Twitter rely upon content hosted via Amazon’s S3 which is billed as offering the following capabilities:
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface
that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time,
from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same
highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage
infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web
sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those
benefits on to developers.
It’s not realistic to think that infrastructure as complex as this won’t suffer service disruption, but one has to wonder what companies who rely on the purported resiliency of the "cloud" from a single provider do in cases where like it’s namesake, the skies open up and the service takes a dump?
I’ll go one further. If today you happen to use S3 for content hosting and wanted like-for-like functionality and service resiliency with a secondary provider, would your app. stack allow you to pull it off without downtime?
What happens if your apps are hosted in a cloud, too?
Sounds like a high-pressure front to me…
Next up: "CPE Security Is Dead(?): All Hail Security in the Cloud(?)"
😉
/Hoff
Chris:
I think it will be years before we fully understand the management, delivery and security implications of cloud computing. The benefits are there as long as the constrains are well understood and technologies/solutions exist, etc.
Greg