The Cloud is Dangerous
biz June 18th, 2008Over the last 18 months Amazon.com super-duper-smart CEO Jeff Bezos has been pushing AWS, or Amazon Web Services. AWS is part of ‘The Cloud’. The Cloud is is another name for all of the computer programs that run on the Internet, that you can’t see. Just like the Internet used to be called (queue booming voice with echo), The Information SuperHighway, ‘The Cloud’ is a sort of a fluffy name for some specific Internet technologies that would be too boring to describe another way.
AWS lets companies that provide software online, like e-commerce web sites, without having to invest in anticipated growth. That means that, if the web site doesn’t grow, you’re not out thousands in hardware, software, and setup costs. Web software companies love the idea.
So, why is it dangerous? Single point of failure.
The Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear attack on the U.S. They primary way it does this is to have many points of failure. In other words, if one part of the U.S. is wiped out, the Internet still works.
This is not the case with The Cloud. Only the largest companies can afford to provide the necessary resources to make a scalable web service provider. Right now the big players are Amazon, Google, and, soon, Microsoft. Google’s version of AWS is called Google App Engine.
Google App Engine went down yesterday for nearly an entire day. The whole thing went down… along with every single application running on it. And Google didn’t know why.
This is bad.
Imagine building a business on a Cloud service and it, the entire ONE, goes down along with yours and thousands (or millions) of other websites. The Internet is working fine, but the single point of failure is down… along with a bunch of income generating businesses.
Until there are many (hundreds) of web service providers like AWS on the Internet, The Cloud will remain a dangerous place to bet your business.
June 22nd, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Hmmm… I think one of the commenters over there has it right. This is a business trade-off. If I trust Google, and Google goes down, I lose a day of business. If I write my own, it may cost me months of lost business as I try to write what Google has already written; and who’s to say my solution will be even as robust as Google’s?
And you know I’m no Google fan. I use almost none of their services; and if I see one more app try to sneak the Google toolbar onto my desktop, I’m gonna scream!
I understand how someone from a macroeconomic view can worry about the single point affecting broad sweeps of the economy at one shot; but from my microeconomic view, Google’s failures are less likely and less costly from my own. I would rather farm out to them what they do best, and concentrate on what’s unique to my business. App hosting is NOT the business I’m in.
The single-point risk can be vastly minimized by Google distributing and mirroring on a large scale. That will prevent physical failures from being widespread, and will at least reduce the risk of systemic failures.
October 13th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Hi,
I found you on twitter, and I’m so glad! Thank you for warning me about the ominous cloud. I hope more people get on board soon. Maybe it needs an injection of shareware?
I will return!