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Cloud Services from Amazon have suffered another set back this week and is causing some to question just how reliable is the cloud and is that the right place for a company to be. While this latest episode caused a minor glitch, the issue of up time is important and when you online business presence is offline, the effects can be devastating. The latest problems happened on Monday,
This all started with a lightening strike on Monday in Dublin, Ireland that knocked out power to the data center and Cloud services. In this situation, they were able to get Cloud services restored within 30 minutes and all services were returned to normal operation. In addition to this event, they had another connectivity problem in Northern Virginia at a data center housing the relational database services and that was resolved in 11 minutes. The problem is that they had two events that interrupt Cloud services. That is not a good sign for them.
Now there are reports of continuing problems for multiple companies because of a software problem in their EBS (Elastic Block Storage) software which has caused problems for some companies. It seems that the software had a problem and detected that there were blocks of data storage that it perceived were no longer in use and as a result deleted them. Within 7 hours, they had restored the deleted data blocks and made corrections to the program so that it will not happen again to their Cloud services.
That impacted a number business and there is other activities that are continuing to be done to recover some items for users accounts and it was expected to be completed within 24 hours. All of this comes at the same time and becomes a concern when 24/7 operations are critical. While operating in the Cloud may be a more efficient way of doing business, including reducing operating costs and personnel costs, the impact of down time is critical to businesses.
Cloud computing services are placed in data centers which have there own issues with up time and some of that cannot be controlled. A Rack Space outage several years ago impacted their services for days. Cloud computing has another layer of complexity because of the sharing of services across multiple servers in potentially multiple locations. All of that presents challenges to companies who are in the Cloud or considering moving to the Cloud. For many, the Cloud is their future and it is still experiencing the growing pains that comes with new technology and one can hope that it will become far more stable than it has been seen this year.
Patrick Gassert