Keep Your Head In The Clouds

I work for a Cloud Computing company.  Probably the biggest in the world.  We have competitors such as Amazon, Microsoft, and a variety of smaller "ma and pop" shops.  I recall, with fondness, a good friend that used to live down the street from me.  He was  key player in a company that was developing technology for what became cloud computing.

He was always excited about this new technology.  Currently he is at a different company now, but what he was starting has swept the world!

The idea of Cloud Computing is a wonderful thing!  Image a place where you can store all of your data, programs, music, photos, etc.  Imagine being able to retrieve this anywhere you are via a laptop computer or a smart phone.  Well we are kinda there right now.  My company provides a means for purchasing a server, whether this be Windows-based or Linux-based is no problem.  You can buy this server and set it up any way you like.  (The company has support people available to help you if you need it.)  You can host a website on these servers, back things up to these servers, or place any data you want on them.  You don't need to worry about a physical server, maintenance, or power outages.  You use the server and let the cloud company do the rest.  Convenient, YES!

This last week Amazon's Cloud had a few problems.  A few very high profile sites, such as Four Square and the popular video game blog, Giant Bomb, went away, gone, poof!

Amazon had some sort of critical failure which caused a cascading failure of many of their servers in data centers across the country.  This reminds me of a situation that occurred back in the day when I worked for a large computing company.  One of our engineers was creating a small program that would perform a specific function on a test server in our lab.  He ran the program, but didn't disconnect the server from the Internet.  A side effect of this program was that it would take down any server that it contacted.  By the time we realized what the program was doing, almost all of the servers in our world-wide company were down!  (Needless to say we created a fix that would make the servers protected against this type of attack.)

With this failure from Amazon, people and companies have become concerned about the fragility of The Cloud.  One quote is as follows:

"Clearly you're not in control of your data, your information," said Campbell McKellar, founder of Loosecubes, a Web site for finding temporary workspace that was not available Thursday.  "It's a major business interruption.  I'm getting business interruption insurance tomorrow, believe me, and maybe we get a different cloud provider as a backup."

A while back I used to work for a company that provided a vital service to over 5,000 clients through cloud computing.  Their selling point, you don't need to install any software, just run it through an Internet browser.  However, one Friday evening, the owner of this company's data center decided to test the fire suppression system.  This was a pressure-based system that basically put out a fire by depriving it of oxygen, thereby saving the computer equipment.  They ran the test, but had the pressure of the system set way too high.  They ended up destroying 5 hard drives in the system's disk array.  (Funny thing was that the disk array could loose up to 4 drives and survive...)  Luckily this was on a Friday, repairs were made on Saturday, backups restored on Sunday, and the service was back online by Monday morning.  The point being that there are so many things that may or many not be in the control of the hosting company.

I have to brag a little about my current company.  We have data centers in key parts of the USA and also the world.  We have yet to have any major failures, heck any failures at all.  We provide the ability for a user to take snapshots of their environments any time they choose.  In addition, we do backups with daily incremental backups.  For the most part, a safe environment for someone who doesn't want the responsibility of maintaining the physical server.

So for some customers that I know, cloud computing solutions are perfect for them.  I can contrast two doctors offices:  The first has their in-house computer and billing system.  They have to pay for system upkeep, maintenance, and down time.  Contrast this to the second doctor office that uses a cloud solution.  All you do is login each morning to the cloud and use your program.  All you do is pay a monthly service bill.

With the variety of services available in the cloud, including the amazing ability to backup your computer overnight, I would like to highly recommend it, but then, I just might be a little bit biased.

Till next time,
Bill