Even the mighty shall sometimes cloudfail

Image via Wikipedia

From the annals of Gigaom:

http://gigaom.com/2009/06/10/amazons-ec2-service-suffers-outage/

Now, If you are not a social gaming startup, but are a supply chain or POS network hosted on AWS, you can do the calculus on whether AWS uptime (excellent by any measure) is better than a solid in-house solution for mission critical infrastructure.  Maybe for some, it computes, for others maybe not.

But when the cloud fails, your alternatives have to be in place. Such as: POS systems might have a set of distributed machines to capture inbound records and route card transactions. Rapid Replenishment systems might capture transaction logs for instant replications once your cloud host comes back. You might have a set of managed APIs that broker to another cloud and then reconcile the resynch.

Many paths. However, there are some businesses that can tolerate the outages that are sure to occur as more move to remote services. One thing is for sure: The single point of failure is not just the cloud infrastructure and platform providers. The land rush to get the mid market onto PAAS solutions has been somewhat willfully blind regarding the following fact – most small /med biz has only one high speed connection, and most have not thought through the issues of hot comms failover at multiple sites.

PAAS that Gas, boys. One of the best things about hosted services in the cloud has been hardly spoken about – It’s great to have all remote offices and facilities routed to a central gateway, rather than running a mishmash of multi-point routers with arcane rules. Downside, comms. Even most SMBs in the 2-25M $$ gross revenue range have been struggling with this. It is what has made the Cisco certifications a viable IT job and created a freelance market.