Sunday, November 27, 2011

Problems in the cloud

Very recently there have been many incidents with the cloud services, which questions against a promising future of a Cloud-based IT world. Customers of many major cloud vendors have faced outage issues including the following:

1) Amazon: Thursday, 21st April 2011. Outage Duration: approx 11 hours + many services partially down for much longer duration (Computerworld)

2) Google: Wednesday, 11th May 2011. Outage duration : approx 30 hours. (ZDNet)

3) Microsoft: May 10 , May 12 2011. Total Outage Duration 9 hours. (eweek)

4) VMware: 25 and 26th April, 2011. Outage time: Several hours (informationweek)

5) Rackspace: June 29, July 7th and then 3 Nov 2009. Total Outage: Several hours (infoworld)


These incidents are not because of secondary issues like ISP failures or natural disasters.

On these corresponding links, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace, Amazon and VMware confessed themselves, that these issues were due to some technical/manual issues at the ultimate source of origin of these services

And customer's problems may not be limited to the cloud service providers, there can be several other factors, due to which the end-customers may find themselves incapable of using the 'Promised' services. Sony's PlayStation Network Catastrophe, Rdio Service Outage, Netsuite Service Outage and just examples from a long list of failures, hitting back against the effectiveness of the cloud services.
Under these circumstances, customer's trust on this upcoming concept and reliability on cloud are under threat.
The cloud is a relevantly new domain, and will certainly face many hiccups before getting stable. So the general recommendation for the customers will be to stick to a Hybrid Scenario, having a backup of all online services and partial (if not full) support for all services in offline mode.

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