Opinion Coping with cloudburst
Cloud must have been the most used word in the tech industry last year.
Cloud must have been the most used word in the tech industry last year. This new technology was supposed to revolutionise computing in every conceivable manner. We were supposed to have laptops which would have no storage of its own,depending entirely on the cloud,thus making them Netbooks in the truest sense of the word. We were supposed to have services which will negate the use of multiple servers and depend entirely on space on the cloud.
Well,that was last year. This April,cloud was again the buzzword,albeit for entirely different reasons. Amazons EC2 could service,the backbone of many popular services like Netflix and Twitter,conked off,leaving hundreds of websites and businesses in the lurch. Larger players like Twitter and Netflix were relatively unaffected as they relied on Amazon as just one of their resources. But the smaller companies,especially the new cloud-based startups,were not that lucky. Many had to shut shop till the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) was up and running again,as they had no backup mechanism.
Amazon later apologised for the outage and attributed it to human error. But the companies which are licking their wounds must now be wondering if it was a good idea to shift to the cloud in the first place. Tech analyst Charles King told newsfactor.com that two key lessons had emerged from the outage: First,systems that rely on single points of failure will fail at some point and,second,companies whose services depend largely or entirely on third parties can do little but complain,apologise,pray and twiddle their thumbs when things go south.
The Amazon incident is sure to have an impact on how companies look at the cloud in future. It is more or less and inevitability now,but everyone will now make sure that they have some backup ready. Cloud services too will have to become fail-proof if they hope to regain the trust of its customers.
In any case,cloud hasnt really captured the tech scene like it was expected to a couple of years back. Of course,there are many cloud services around and interestingly even their regular users dont realize that they are working on the cloud. But the technology has not yet brought it the drastic changes predicted. Moreover,even companies seem to be a bit vary about touting that they are entirely cloud-based. Maybe they already feared something like the Amazon cloudburst.
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