More Outages in Forecast for Cloud Computing

By Jeff Feinman

July 25, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 2)
With the outages occurring in Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service and Apple’s MobileMe device, analysts say growing pains for cloud computing will lead to further problems.

James Staten, a principal analyst with Forrester Research, said in these early stages of the cloud that outages are expected. He said he fully expects more outages this year and next year for the S3 service, but if Amazon is doing the proper things to improve service, the outage lengths will decrease from the eight-hour incident on Sunday.

S3 users should make sure that there is a backup in place, whether it is in another cloud storage service or in replicating data to their own data center, Staten said. However, cloud outages, compared to ones that the average enterprise experience within its own data center, are pretty minor.

Staten downplayed Amazon and Apple’s outages, saying that an eight-hour outage isn’t something to worry about, in Amazon’s case. Additionally, S3 didn’t report any data loss, only connectivity outage. He also attributed Apple’s MobileMe e-mail issues to congestion in the system.

“That said, all the [companies] that want to offer cloud service have to keep in mind that an outage is a whole lot different at this level,” Staten said, because of connectivity loss. “A cloud outage gets you front page news.”

John Rath, an independent consultant, agreed that because cloud computing is still early in the game, there will be outages. He also said that a cloud should consist of multiple data centers, so that if one goes down, there will be minimal effect.

“I kind of thought that’s what S3 was, and some of the other Amazon services,” Rath said, “but I’ve since learned that they’re not that distributed, and there’s still a single point of failure with the log-in piece. You’re logging in through a central place, and if that goes down, you’re not able to get to your resources.”

Amazon’s other cloud service, the Elastic Compute Cloud Web service, has also experienced outages, but Staten said they have diminished in frequency and length, “which shows they’re getting better at this.”

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