I have been thinking about efficiencies and time saving and so am going to create a template for reporting on cloud outages.
Only last week, I was asking what has happened to the cloud, as there were so many outages that I speculated that confidence would be dented.
And then yesterday, Twitter users in here, in the UK and US experienced up to two hours of service loss. Added to this, was an outage in the Google Talk service that the company admitted affected a "majority of users". Ironically, many disgruntled users took to Twitter to express their displeasure.
Now while Twitter does not necessarily leap to mind when talking about cloud services, the company admitted in a blog post that near simultaneous failures in separate data centres cause the outage.
In fact, if you look at the Twitter story link above, you’ll see our cross linking tag for Outages that will let you see all of our coverage of these increasingly common occurrences.
Google gave no explanation for the outage, but is highly embarrassing as it undermines everything that is supposed to make cloud services preferable to on premise solutions.
You can’t compete with the might of Google/Amazon/Microsoft etc, they have scale and resilience you could only dream of etc. While this may be true on paper, when such giants have failures, the failures are also of such vast scale that they affect a large number of users and garner such coverage as to perhaps make people think twice.
As the UK Financial Services Authority has warned UK banks that they need to upgrade legacy IT systems to prevent failures such as the RBS debacle, perhaps the major cloud service providers should equally do some soul searching and architecture cleaning to identify bottlenecks, weak points and single points of failure, lest businesses start to look more sceptically at the cloud and think that they could do better themselves.
UPDATE: Looks like I’d better get cracking on the cloud service outage template as Microsoft resolves two-hour outage on Windows Azure
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