Cloud computing: More Than Another Amazon Cloud Outage, Fear Complacency

Success hides problems and truth is, Amazon didn't know what hit 'em. Sure there was a man-made error to start with but who would've thought that a self-healing feature actually made things worse. Right out of a movie script if you ask me.

Plan for failure is good reasonable advice but certainly doesn't cover everything and vague for most to truly appreciate and apply. Important to remember that at this stage, there will be trickles about specifics before the fact. But then, this shouldn't stop you with cloud plans.

Be vigilant instead and continue working to get small wins. Much as we know a lot about the cloud, the things we're unaware of - problems that remain out of sight, actually hold the more valuable answers.

To freeze and stop with cloud computing now is the real disaster.

Here are excellent blog posts covering the outage to get you moving in the right cloud direction from hereon:

The Big List of Articles on the Amazon Outage

Learning the right lessons from the Amazon cloud outage

Final Thoughts on the Five-Day AWS Outage | eWeek
Amazon EC2 Outage Explained and Lessons Learned | InfoQ

“Two things companies need to focus on to get a better understanding of their cloud solutions: diversity & control”

Cloud computing around the web : April 25- May 1

Posted via email from friarminor's posterous

Spread the SaaS love, Web 2.0

99.9% as a number is nothing to be scoffed at. I don't remember even getting those numbers academically (maybe once during a research presentation where the dean thought I was exceptional - which I promise to never happen again or I'll eat okra for breakfast).

But with web services, 99.9% is a big deal and outages, depending on perspectives, can either spell trouble and opportunity. Honestly, I don't find anything unusual about outages. They happen and will happen, as certain as the next big tsunami that experts warned coastline residents about. Oh, I guess no one ever saw it and if one did, he was taken for a fool and/or got no PR.

SLAs, building trust, contingency plans and just being upfront with downtimes can lessen the headaches but in the long run it will always be the values added to the services that will carry on the relationships, between startups, established companies and surprise, between people, too

And that's Web 2.0 for you.