Submission + - Good News About The Cloud: Everything Fails (forbes.com)
SpitefulBen writes: What lessons should architects of high-availability services take from events such as the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the Amazon Web Services outage of April 2011?
Michael Crandell writes in Forbes, "These events prove that neither public clouds nor private data centers constitute a magic bullet for all the needs of today's businesses. In the case of the Amazon cloud, it may in fact have been its remarkable record of operational excellence that led customers to assume that the inherent scalable, redundant and global nature of the cloud would protect them from having their systems go down. It'(TM)s the ability to fail over to alternative cloud resources pools quickly and seamlessly that is critical to maintaining continuous operations. Already, ZDNet Japan has reported on several new cloud deployments by private companies and government agencies as a direct result of the earthquake."
Michael Crandell writes in Forbes, "These events prove that neither public clouds nor private data centers constitute a magic bullet for all the needs of today's businesses. In the case of the Amazon cloud, it may in fact have been its remarkable record of operational excellence that led customers to assume that the inherent scalable, redundant and global nature of the cloud would protect them from having their systems go down. It'(TM)s the ability to fail over to alternative cloud resources pools quickly and seamlessly that is critical to maintaining continuous operations. Already, ZDNet Japan has reported on several new cloud deployments by private companies and government agencies as a direct result of the earthquake."
