Cloud computing is becoming very popular and the last few years have seen millions of businesses migrate over to the cloud but at the same time there’s still a lose of control which most people feel when they make the switch. When we sign our terms of service there’s always something that says how unheard of outages are and we’re told over and over that the cloud is safe. All the benefits of the cloud were strongly knocked last weekend when one of the biggest cloud hosts were knocked offline for several hours. For more than thirty minutes last Sunday Amazon was down across several of its UK sites. Amazon’s sites are among the biggest ecom sites in the world and they’re hosted through Amazon’s own cloud service EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), this hosting is responsible for millions of other users all over the world being on the cloud too.

This has left a lot of people asking how someone like Amazon can afford to have their own servers down during a peak shopping period and what chance any other cloud computing companies have? Amazon have said this crash was the result of a hardware failure in a data center based in Europe. We all know that Amazon were behind the original hosting of the whistle blowing site WikiLeaks and was being targeted by hackers for withdrawing their hosting. Amazon have been making a rather large song and dance this week telling us the problem really was with their data centers. This is not the first time they’ve had to cope with down time as it was just six months ago when they were last down but yet all their Web Services remained unaffected.

The reputation of the cloud has taken a bit of a bashing because of this as has virtualization technology in general. When it comes to their cloud service level Amazon have always said it’s around 99.95% which does mean it will be down for around four and a half hours every year. This is not what’s worrying people though as this particular down time was not scheduled. As cloud is just starting to take off this could be enough to damage its reputation before it’s even had a chance to show us what it can do.

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Mobile & Cell Phones