Cloud Excitement: What Is Up?

September 21, 2015

I noted two items about cloud services. The first is summarized in “Skype Is Down Worldwide for Many Users.” I used Skype last week one time. I noted that the system was unable to allow my Skype conversationalist to hear me. We gave up fooling with the systems, and the person who wanted to speak with me called me up. I wonder how much that 75 minute international call cost. Exciting.

I also noted that Amazon went offline for some of its customers on September 21, 2015. The information was in “Amazon Web Services Experiences Outages Sunday Morning, Causing Disruptions On Netflix, Tinder, Airbnb And More.”

Several observations are warranted:

What happened to automatic failover, redundancy, and distributed computing? I assumed that Google’s loss of data in its Belgium data center was a reminder that marketing chatter is different from actual data center reality. Guess not?
Whom or what will be blamed? Amazon will have a run at the Ashburn, Virginia nexus. Microsoft will probably blame a firmware or software update. The cause may be a diffusion of boots on the ground technical knowledge. Let’s face it. These cloud services are complicated puppies. As staff seek their future elsewhere and training is sidestepped, the potential for failure exists. The fix-it-and-move on approach to engineering adds to the excitement. Failure, in a sense, is engineered into many of these systems.
What about the promise of having one’s data in the cloud so nothing is lost, no downtime haunts the mobile device user, and no break in a seamless user experience occurs? More baloney? Yep, probably.

Net net: I rely on old fashioned computing and software methods. I think I lost data about 25 years ago and went offline never. Redundancy, reliability, and fail over take work gentle reader, not marketing and advertising.

How old school. The reason my international call took place was a result of my having different mobile telephony accounts plus an old Bell head landline. Expensive? Sure, but none of this required me to issue a news release, publicize how wonderful my cloud system was, and the egg-on-the-face reality of failure.

Stephen E Arnold, September 21, 2015

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Cloud computing, Marketing, News, Technology

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.