S3 outage: not all clouds have a silver lining
Like many people, I’ve shifted more and more of my computing activities to "the cloud," using services like Flickr, Zoho Writer and Gmail as regular tools, not merely adjuncts to desktop applications. And I’m not alone; entire businesses are being built on the idea that desktop apps are dinosaurs, and the future of computing rests with thin client appliances connected to massive servers and databases. However, this weekend’s outage of Amazon’s S3 data storage service may have some people rethinking their commitment to the cloud. It’s unclear how many services were offline as a result of the outage, but one that particularly irked me was Amazon’s own Kindle network. As a recent convert to Kindledom, I’ve gotten used to using the device as a thin client appliance, downloading RSS feeds, checking my email and sometimes even buying books. Yesterday, however, I was offline all day, and nothing on Amazon’s Kindle support site made note of the issue. I was left to wonder whether, despite having three bars most of the day, I had somehow wandered out of range. The event left me frustrated, and served as a reminder of how fragile cloud computing really is. As Om Malik points out, "the cloud has many points of failure – routers crashing, cable getting accidentally cut, load balancers getting misconfigured, or simply bad code." I’m not ready to give up on the cloud (or the Kindle) just yet, but I am going to continue to back up my data locally—and make more use of applications like Evernote that have both desktop and online versions, so that I can work efficiently regardless of connectivity, and be sure that my work is accessible wherever and whenever I need it.
