07 4 / 2008
Cloud issues: Amazon again. [availability/process]
Looks like there’s trouble in the cloud once more, and specifically, it’s happening over at Amazon. This weekend, I went through the list of Amazon’s web services, just to see what developers are taking advantage of, and all of Amazon’s offerings are low cost solutions that are highly attractive to start-ups. Unfortunately, they are starting to look less reliable, since the last issue several weeks ago. Are those talented Amazon testers running through all of the possible risks? Network reliability, performance and connectivity, these items should be the number one priority for these low-cost solutions, but apparently it’s not. I’m a firm believer of the cliché “you get what you pay for”, but how can any start-up turn down Amazon’s storage solutions and message queue services? It’s almost a no-brainer, especially if you’re online Web 2.0 killer app is funded by credit cards.
Erik Schonfeld at TechCrunch writes:
“Amazon does not guarantee 100 percent uptime for its Web Services, although it does strive to achieve that. And data centers go down all the time, no matter who is hosting your data. But more and more companies are relying on Amazon to be able to scale their computing resources on demand and do it cheaply by paying only for what they need. Many Web startups are building their entire businesses on top of Amazon’s Web Services, and even an hour of unavailability is unacceptable. At least this one happened during the middle of the night.”
All that’s needed is a major crash to some budding Web 2.0 app, and then the world will start to take a second look at doing business in the cloud. I suppose it’s all relative. RIM has had failures in the past and the “crackberry” addictions haven’t suffered much.
