Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Up, Up and Away (Or An Alternative to Downtime)

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The big news this weekend was Amazon S3 storage service’s downtime on Sunday. The accounts I have seen are reporting that the service down for anywhere from 5-7 hours, causing a great many members- and large companies included – hours of no access to their valuable, if not imperative, online data.

Some of the harsh criticism is warranted, some of it is not. Amazon S3 has a pretty good track-record and has been mostly reliable (S3 also experienced downtime in February). The equation gets more complex when you account for downtime among members from other companies who rely on S3 to host static files like images, style sheets, etc. for their web applications (37 Signals, Twitter and it‘s apps like SmugMug, Drop.io, and others). Depending on what they are using S3 for, an outage like yesterday can pull the plug on some, if not most, of these sites functionality.

This instance of downtime should not, however, give cloud computing a bad rap. That would be like allowing MobileMe’s service to scuff up Apple’s bright and shiny image. Or allowing a large, blue whale (carried by a pack of tiny birds – huh?) to give Twitter a bad name…

Amazon S3 is, after all, just one of many, many players out there in cloud storage. Just another player in the game, if you will – and when one player is injured, by most accounts the game must go on. We’re here, we’re up and we’re not going anywhere. If you are interested to read more about Box security, have a look here.

Up, up and awaaaaayyyyyyy…

Kendra

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