When The Cloud Bursts

This is why I keep my own local backups and don’t trust my important data storage to some remote server I can’t see, run by someone I don’t know.

Amazon’s trouble raises cloud computing doubts

The black out at Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) data centre has cast a shadow over cloud computing, which has been hailed as a sturdy, reliable and inexpensive storage and network solution, especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that cannot afford their own large servers.

On the early morning of April 21 (Pacific Day Time), Amazon’s EC2 data centre in Virginia crashed, taking down with it several popular websites and small businesses that depend on it. These included favoured social networking destinations like Evite, Quora, Reddit and Foursquare, among others. Now, the question is being asked: if an Amazonian cloud giant can crash so badly, what about the rest? Is cloud computing as reliable as we thought?

See also:
Amazon cloud service outage crashes numerous sites
Amazon EC2 Outage Shows Risks of Cloud
Amazon AWS downtime shakes faith in the cloud
Investigation on after Amazon’s cloud nightmare
Amazon gets ‘F’ for communication amidst cloud outage
Seven lessons to learn from Amazon’s outage
Mitigating the Risk of Cloud Services Failure
Lessons From a Cloud Failure: It’s Not Amazon, It’s You
The Amazon Cloud Failure Redux
2nd UPDATE: Amazon Says ‘Majority’ Of Cloud Problems Resolved

Online banking and web file storage is all well and good until, of course, it crashes and the data disappears.

/I sleep better knowing I have paper records and physical backup drives