Software as a Service (SaaS)

Is Amazons Small Crash a Giant Crash for Cloud Computing?

Posted by Ben Worthen

Today was a bad day for a new computing model that could one day be the norm. Amazon’s S3 service –which companies can use to rent data storage on Amazon’s tech gear — crashed this morning, knocking many small businesses offline and highlighting one of the model’s drawbacks: You’re putting your operations in somebody else’s hands.

For some reason clouds are the go-to metaphor for the Internet

Many pundits believe that so-called cloud computing, where information is stored on centralized tech equipment and accessed over the Internet, is the computing industry’s evolutionary next step. Amazon’s S3 service is one of the most prominent clouds around. Customers rent space for their information on Amazon’s tech equipment – it costs $0.15 per GB a month to store data, with additional fees to transfer data in and out – which is often cheaper than buying and operating equipment of their own. On its Web site, Amazon touts that S3 allows customers to scale their data demands up or down rapidly, and that the service is available 99.99% of the time.

Amazon broke that promise today, albeit barely. S3 was down from around 7:30 am to 10:15 am EST. Several businesses that use S3, including the blogging service Twitter and the New York Times, were affected. Customers were understandably angry. “My business is effectively closed right now because Amazon did something wrong,” says one message board poster quoted by the Times. “I’ll have to reconsider using the service now.”

A two to three hour outage, while not common, is the sort of problem that a corporate information-technology department experiences from time to time. It’s bad for business, but not the end of the world. But when you’re dealing with something that challenges the status quo routine, problems invariably draw attention to shortcomings with the model. In this case, it isn’t your techies that are trying to get your business up and running, but Amazon’s. You’re left to twiddle your thumbs while customers check out your competitor’s site. Will a black eye turn out to be a knock-out punch in this case? Probably not, but it’s a bigger story than if a few businesses had their sites go down.