Why You Shouldn't Worry about Cloud Outages
Let’s face it: We love to see people fall flat on their faces and fail—unless we are directly affected. That’s why I viewed with such interest the following slideshow detailing cloud outages, hosted on both CIO.com and InfoWorld.com. I have to admit that I did laugh at some of the outages and wondered how things could go so wrong for these large companies, such as Dropbox, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. We are not talking about mom-and-pop shops here.
Rather than bash these companies and their obvious failures this year, I thought I would take a different look at the topic of “the cloud” and dig deeper into its phenomenon. A NetworkWorld article points out that in 2011 public cloud services accounted for a $91 billion market; this is expected to grow to $207 billion by 2016, according to Gartner’s calculations. The author discusses the ways Amazon and other companies are trying to limit their exposure to outages, mainly with a concept called availability zones—a fancy term for failover.
The public cloud providers are obviously a part of big business, and they don’t like the outages and the embarrassment it causes them. However, every year these cloud-related problems seem to crop up. In 2012, CRN.com looked at the ten worst cloud outages for that year and found Dropbox, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google on this list. In 2011, we found the same companies involved—well, minus Dropbox.
So what does this mean? From the outside looking in, this may scare you to death. However, I say take this with a grain of salt. Remember, if you or I mess up, it’s doubtful anyone will ever hear about it. Let Steve Ballmer make a mistake—and that makes the evening news.
On Forbes a writer uses 100 words and some great links to answer whether or not the cloud is safe. One of the links looks at the five people in an organization who should be the most concerned with the cloud, its safety, and trustworthiness.
I found one article on how to avoid cloud failures that recommended more of a private-cloud solution. Another article on Rackspace takes a deep dive into how to avoid the pitfalls and maximize the benefits of moving to a public cloud.
As with any technology there are going to be issues and things beyond your control. Hopefully your failures won’t make anyone’s top ten list.
Has your cloud implementation been smooth sailing or a bumpy ride?
