Cloud Computing: Best And Worst News Of 2012
December 19, 2012
Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.
With KPMG predicting a doubling of cloud services revenue over the next two years, it’s a good time to point out where cloud computing has gained strength over the past year in capabilities and services. At the same time, we should look at the cloud’s weaknesses, as a cautionary tale for those IT teams whom KPMG says are about to migrate production applications to the cloud.
Here are the top seven developments we saw in public cloud computing in 2012: The three biggest setbacks, and the four biggest wins. We’ll start with the setbacks.
Setback #1: Outages Plague Amazon And Others.
When you’re trying to convince big companies to bet their business on cloud operations, the worst thing that can happen is for the cloud infrastructure you’re thinking of using to suffer an unplanned outage. Amazon Web Services didn’t have an outage in 2012 that rivaled the hit it took over the Easter weekend in April 2011, when multi-availability zones in one of its data centers went down. However, Amazon was nevertheless buffeted at its big East Coast complex by service outages on June 14 and June 29, due to power outages…
The June 29 outage came after the region suffered a series of violent electrical storms, and the outages were contained to one availability zone inside the data center. Amazon didn’t say why the battery and generator backup systems of a supposedly highly available cloud didn’t keep services running. The outage only disrupted important customers for a few minutes, but they were some of Amazon’s most prominent customers, including Salesforce.com’s developer cloud Heroku, Netflix, and social networking firms Instagram and Pinterest. On Oct. 22, Amazon suffered an outage of its Elastic Block Storage service for a few hours, making it impossible for some companies to update their websites or retrieve data, even though the sites remained on display…
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