And the Cloud Came Crashing Down

If you haven’t already noticed, Amazon’s EC2 cloud has had a rather trying few days.  That’s the thing about public clouds.  Even if they’re far more reliable than hosting services of the past, when they go down they take down everyone at the same time.  Then it becomes a very public debacle.  So what you have is a statistically more reliable internet that seems more vulnerable nonetheless.  This won’t be the last time this happens, and Amazon won’t be the only one hit.  ‘Nuff said?

By the way, let me take a moment to say that while headlines have the crash at Amazon’s cloud taking out everyone but Gaddafi, it didn’t manage to take down Ramblings, hah!  Ok, so it could happen here just as easily, but hey.  Since moving to a cloud server last year this site has seen substantially improved uptime by all measures.  And if several simultaneous meteor strikes take out enough Rackspace infrastructure to take their cloud down for a a few days, that will *still* be true even though the press would no doubt write enough content to fill a book about the risks of centralization.

The timing was especially apropos for me, because I just signed up for EC2 last Thursday as part of a ‘hmmm I wonder what I could use this for’ tour – with an eye toward adding diversity to Ramblings’ infrastructure someday.  I didn’t actually do anything with it yet – I swear I wasn’t the one to break it!  But many websites, including some big ones, had their lack of diversity exposed by this bigtime – and they will surely be drawing up some better contingency plans this week.

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Categories: Cloud Computing