No Reason to Panic Over Periodic Cloud Outages

Grazed from ChannelNomics. Author: Larry Walsh.

Amazon.com became the fourth major site and/or Internet service to go dark in the past week. The sudden outage that lasted 15 minutes meant millions of online consumers couldn’t order “50 Shades of Gray” or the latest John Mayer CD.

More importantly, though, this string over service outages is drawing attention to the fragility of the Internet and cloud-based services. While cloud computing is still evolving, it has become an indispensable part of our daily work and personal life. Consider what’s happened in the past week.

• Microsoft’s Outlook.com – the recently rebranded cloud email service – was dark for many users for days. Microsoft has issued an apology to users and has restored service. However, the outage comes as Microsoft is touting the high uptime for Office 365 and other cloud services.
• The New York Times – the gray old lady and bastion of traditional journalism – was offline for several hours last Wednesday due to technical difficulties. The Washington Post described the scene as people “surging out of their offices in a blind panic” because they couldn’t catch up on the latest news trends…

• Google – the gateway to all things online – disappeared for about 5 minutes last Friday, taking with it about 40 percent of all Internet traffic. And it wasn’t just search that vanished; so too did most of Google’s Web services, including Google Drive and Google Apps.

Internet and cloud service outages are nothing new, and nor will they end anytime soon. If anything, cloud service providers are doing a good job of incrementally improving quality and reliability of service delivery as they reach for the fabled five-nines (99.999%) reliability rating. If they achieve that, service should be available for all but 5 minutes per year – roughly the amount of time Google was off line last week…

Read more from the source @ http://channelnomics.com/2013/08/20/no-reason-to-panic-over-periodic-cloud-outages/