One of the key mantras of cloud computing is reliability through redundancy, yet this week’s still-ongoing Amazon EC2 outage shows that more needs to be done to prevent the possibility of a ‘single point of failure’ occurring in cloud computing environments.
Amazon’s cloud redundancies failed to stop the mass outage, which affected thousands of websites all at once—triggering what might be huge monetary losses for companies like Quora, Foursquare, Reddit, Heroku, SCVNGR, Hootsuite, Wildfire, Livefyre.
The impact to Amazon could also be significant, depending on how diligent its customers were in devising SLAs. As Connected Planet covered in a talk with Verizon last month, telcos may become more attractive to enterprises over time because of the end-to-end SLAs on application performance they can offer customers, as well as the ability to spread risk over over hundreds or thousands of data centers around the world. As that article points out, only cloud providers that control hundreds of data centers, as well as the networks underlying those data centers, can offer true end-to-end SLA capabilities.
It’s for that reason that companies with mission-critical applications may increasingly look to telecom service providers for cloud computing. But is there really enough protection built into cloud environments, or do enterprise customers of all sizes need to do more to build protections in so that content can be spread out or moved off of failing clouds environments when failures occur?
The fact Amazon could not readily move content to other locations proves that companies with mission-critical content must do more to build redundancy into their systems and the applications running on those systems.
Can can telecom cloud providers “take advantage” – not to be too crass – of Amazon’s cloud problems this week to better sell enterprises on their combination of data center and network redundancy and service assurance?
Let us know what you think? Can telco cloud providers be viewed as the “safer” alternative in the cloud marketing wars?
While Amazon can be considered an amateur compared to Telcos/Cellcos which are professionals, the whole cloud computing service is not really thought through yet as a service to the masses. Clearly the telco service providers and their suppliers know how to have reliable and very highly available services, but having to guarantee specific bandwidths for specific customers (SLA) in a \"cloud\" is still not a mature art. The technology needs more sophisticated control/traffic management algorithms to reach a comfortable point with reasonable expense to customers.