Amazon's three-day woes raise questions over cloud computing
It's easy shuffling off all that danged computer internet stuff to another operator , but what happens when he runs into trouble himself?
The term "The cloud" refers to the accessing of services and information in big data centers remotely over the internet from anywhere - as if the services were in a cloud.
The discussion, Mr Eastwood said, would be which data and computer operations to send off to the cloud - and which to keep inside the corporate walls. How much extra to pay for back-up and recovery services could also now be an issue.
That is because the companies hit hardest by the Amazon interruption were fast-moving start-ups focused on growth - and less apt to pay for extensive backup and recovery services.
Amazon, the early leader in cloud computing, started five years ago offering computing resources from its sophisticated data centres. Companies outsource computing chores over the web to avoid the costs and headaches of running their own data centers.
Amazon's thousands of corporate customers, range from giants like Pfizer and Netflix to start-ups, whose businesses often live on Amazon Web Services.
Those with troubles this past week included social networking site Foursquare; Quora, a question-and-answer service; Reddit, a news-sharing site; and BigDoor, which makes game tools for Web publishers. Problems varied from service interruptions to sites being shut down.
Netflix said it had been virtually unscathed. “That’s because Netflix has taken full advantage of Amazon Web Services’ redundant cloud architecture,” which insures against technical malfunctions in any one location, a Netflix spokesman told the New York Times.
Amazon has data centers around the world, including one in Ireland, but the current problems have come from its big centre in Northern Virginia. Amazon’s Web page on its cloud services said on Friday that matters were improving but were still not resolved.
The long-term toll to cloud computing, if any, was uncertain, said the NYT. Corporate cloud computing is still expected to grow by more than 25 percent a year, to $55.5 billion by 2014.
The Amazon interruption, said Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace, a specialist in data centre services, was the computing equivalent of a plane crash - a major episode with widespread damage. But airline travel, he said, was still safer than traveling in a car . Similarly cloud computing is safer than data centers run by individual companies.
On the Govtech website, Dan Lohrman said the outage had shaken trust in the cloud and added, "Given that AWS' North Virginia data center has been out of whack for more than 24 hours, it's clear you need to procure more than one cloud. You need a backup for your cloud provider's backup.”
UPDATE: This afternoon the Health Services Dashboard showed services operating normally everywhere with a couple of minor qualifications in N. Virginia. The company said, "We are digging deeply into the root causes of this event and will post a detailed post mortem."