Ask three people what ‘the cloud’ is and get three different answers.

Amazon’s outage in their cloud-based Relational Database Service, part of their Amazon Web Services, took a major hit this week. As coincidence would have it, I have been giving consideration of some some cloud-based services in my capacity as an IT manager, thinking it might just be getting safe enough to dip a toe in the water.

Amazon.com is well into the second day of trying to fix a cloud outage that has partially disabled or knocked out popular Web sites like Quora, Foursquare and Reddit.

The trouble started a little after 5 a.m. ET Thursday when the company’s Service Health Dashboard reported connectivity issues that were affecting its Relational Database Service, which is used to manage a relational database in the cloud, across multiple zones in the eastern U.S.

Because of server problems at Amazon’s data center, which handles the company’s EC2 Web hosting services, Web sites, including popular Web 2.0 sites, were left staggering or disabled.

As of noon ET Friday, these sites have been affected for about 30 hours.

via: Computer World

I have been impacted personally from this outage having an SVN code repository with Assembla.com that has been unavailble for two days now. I had no idea they were using Amazon’s ECS and never would have had this outage not happened. But now that it has, I’m sure many IT professionals are going to reconsider their current strategies as well as taking another long, hard look at any plans to rely on supposed fault-tolerant, bullet-proof, cloud-based services.

It was the timing of this outage and my consideration of a cloud storage option that prompted me to start writing this article, but not two paragraphs into it I made a self-discovery: what is the cloud? Without context, it can be pretty vague. “The Cloud”, at its basic form, is simply the public Internet; an amorphous entity represented graphically as  a puffy cloud for the aforementioned reasons.

Microsoft’s efforts to elevate public awareness of the term haven’t helped. In its cloud-focused Windows 7 campaign, Microsoft refers to the cloud like it’s a product they included in the operating system. In the “Airport” spot, a couple stranded at the airport use the Internet to access their movies at home.

 

Really? Remote access is the cloud? I find it misleading to attach ‘cloud’ to literally any action related to using the Internet, but that seems to be the prevailing marketing strategy at Microsoft.

From an IT infrastructure perspective, especially for smaller businesses, there has long been a conflict between keeping services on-premise or relying on the purported reliability of data centers. Where a larger organization has the resources to multi-site and hot-site their infrastructure, a small business typically does not and is forced to choose between the two or, as I tend to do, create a hybrid of both to hedge your bets.

For me, this outage is simple proof that no basket, regardless of who makes it or what promises they make me, is ever safe enough for all of my eggs.