Web Business by Ken Burbary

The computing cloud just got bigger

I’ve already written about cloud computing and some of the reasons why I think it is a game changer, forever altering how we look and utilize web hosting (for the better). It looks like Rackspace believes the same, as evidenced by their annoucement yesterday that Mosso, a Rackspace subsidiary, will now offer cloud computing similar to Amazon Web Services. Specific product offering and pricing can be viewed by clicking on the image below:

It’s encouraging to see more players, especially industry leaders, jumping into this space along with Amazon. The result will be increased innovation, competition, and a more mature cloud computing offering. All of which benefit their customers. As the Mosso slogan says, it’s time to “Code, load and go.”

Cloud computing hiccups

I’ve been closely following Amazon’s progress with AWS, Amazon Web Services, for some time now. Many of the services they offer, the Simple Storage Service in particular, have grown rapidly as a popular choice for many web startups and companies seeking a cheaper storage alternative to their own datacenters. In fact, some colleagues of mine have moved forward with putting their entire technology platform inside the Amazon computing cloud.

All of the momentum behind Amazon S3 came to a screeching halt today when customers experienced a service failure that lasted for 2 hours.

Many Amazon customers and technologists through the blogosphere have reacted with outrage and harsh criticism of Amazon over the issue. While it is certainly disruptive and unfortunate, the risk of an outage like this is one of the trade-offs you take on with the benefits of using S3. As of this writing, Amazon’s S3 SLA only guarantees 99.9% uptime. That, coupled with the fact that commercial cloud computing on this scale is still in its infancy almost sets the stage for these issues.

That said, I don’t believe this will be anything more than a temporary black eye to Amazon. They will continue to improve, innovate and optimize the service reliability. Adding monitoring tools and providing visibility into the system’s health data will probably also come.

Are you using any of Amazon Web Services? Would this recent service failure deter you from using them? Send me your thoughts.