Amazon crisis poses question on the future of Cloud Computing
By siliconindia   |   Monday, 25 April 2011, 15:27 IST   |    1 Comments
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Bangalore: Amazon's failure to safeguard the cloud has raised many questions on future of Could Computing . The outrage in disruption that occurred in 20th April entered its third day, leaving many of its clients disappointed. The fury of websites like Reddit and Quora is justified as they had incurred a huge amount of loss due to disabled access. The credibility of Amazon is trapped in a vicious circle now since Amazon is believed to have a lot of back up for its computing infrastructure. Companies put their trust in these cloud vendors and situation like this puts a question on the reliability on these vendors.According to market researcher IDC Cloud industry is an industry that is supposed to grow to $55 billion by 2014. But when Amazon data centre in Virginia crashed, taking down with it several popular websites this estimate seems little shaky. The Elastic Compute service provided by Amazon is relied by bunch of web sites. And users rely upon these services to store their personal accounts and data remotely. Hence when Elastic Compute service goes down the website too experience the jerk and hence it affects its users and so do its business. Lydia Leong, research vice-president and cloud computing expert at Gartner said people will realize now that cloud is merely about viability and not about continuous availability and it is not a magic like they earlier thought. The cloud protects users when their own home computers crash and lose data. But the demerit is about the crash of the cloud is that millions upon millions of users become helpless and any recovery of the data is beyond their control. Some of the sites spend the money to run mirror sites on other cloud vendors in order to functional even if one cloud vendor goes down. However that?s quite an expensive affair which most of the websites had not availed off. George Reese of O'Reilly wrote that Amazon's setback is a learning experience and is for the most part a shining example of how the cloud works properly. That seems like a severe attempt to see the glass as half full. He argued that the web site developers should have planned for this kind of outage and taken advantage of Amazon's full backup capabilities. That discussion, he said, will most likely center on what data and computer operations to send off to the cloud and what to keep inside the corporate walls. Netflix uses Amazon but it hasn't gone offline because it fully uses Amazon's redundant cloud backup infrastructure. For most startups, those are luxuries that are too expensive, despite the risks. Hence organizations have to take some stiff decision on what computer operations to put on a cloud operated by external vendors and how much they should keep inside their own internal data centers. They will also have to figure out the right policies for backup and recovery services. And they will have to decide whether to allocate more money to backup data centers in multiple locations.