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The black out at Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) data centre has cast a shadow over cloud computing, which has been hailed as a sturdy, reliable and inexpensive storage and network solution, especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that cannot afford their own large servers.
On the early morning of April 21 (Pacific Day Time), Amazon's EC2 data centre in Virginia crashed, taking down with it several popular websites and small businesses that depend on it. These included favoured social networking destinations like Evite, Quora, Reddit and Foursquare, among others. Now, the question is being asked: if an Amazonian cloud giant can crash so badly, what about the rest? Is cloud computing as reliable as we thought?
"People will now realise that cloud isn't magic like they earlier thought it was," says Lydia Leong, research vice-president and cloud computing expert at technology research and advisory firm Gartner . "They will now realise that cloud is merely about viability and not about continuous availability."
But that's exactly the kind of marketing pitch that sold cloud computing to many small businesses, including the ever-increasing social networking bandwagon. SMEs are now graduating to the next level of cloud computing, using it not just for storage, but also for active computing purposes like communication, sustaining remote workforces and deploying cloud services like remote IT help, cloud operating systems , and so on. The impact of such an outage, therefore, is felt even more.
Online businesses affected by the EC2 outage lost that many hours of ad revenues, business opportunities and drops of the precious trust of many loyal followers, a primary pillar of social networking. The losses are hard to quantify.
"Since Amazon isn't giving a customer list, we can only guess. From what we know, it's probably in millions of dollars," says computer scientist David Alan Grier of the eminent Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ( IEEE )) Society and author of When Computers were Human and Too Soon to Tell: Essays for the End of the Computer Revolution . "The biggest problem, though, could be the loss of confidence in cloud computing. We still don't know why the Virginia data centre failed."
The EC2 holds incredibly valuable data of Amazon's cloud client companies. And yet, Amazon's Virginia centre is, according to sources, remarkably open and vulnerable, located in an ordinary industrial building near Dulles Airport.
Although Amazon will probably recover quickly, the event has damaged its credibility. Time will tell how badly. "If Amazon can explain the problem and make a good case for why the damage may not be big, then it will be fine," says Grier. "If not, the work will go elsewhere. Amazon may be a big player, but there are other big players waiting to step into the game." These include the likes of Google , IBM , Cisco, RedHat and Microsoft (whose cloud ads are all over Silicon Valley), to name a few.
"Amazon's cloud competitors are likely to use this outage as a marketing tool. But it could have happened to anybody," says an ex-HP cloud veteran who currently works at one of Silicon Valley's most promising cloud start-ups, which recently got acquired.
