I’d love to know how Amazons S3 stats looked the day after the Sidekick disaster. Did people stop trusting “the cloud”? Or are they just using cloud storage for less important stuff that they are also backing up in other places? The essence of cloud computing is trusting your cloud provider. Preston de Guise provides an excellent analysis of what this event teaches us:
Despite what some pundits would tell you as they desperately scramble to protect the “good name” of cloud from yet another tarry lining, sidekick is cloud. Sidekick was in fact cloud at its strongest level of hubris. Data in the cloud with no ready provisioning for seamless local backup and restore. Cloud goes, data goes. It’s that simple. You couldn’t get a more buzzword compliant appearance of cloud than that.
Even if some or all data can be restored, multi-day outages are not the way to build trust. This disaster will be used as a textbook example of the dangers of cloud computing for decades.
Dark clouds up ahead
So how far can you trust your storage provider? Let’s highlight some of Amazon’s S3 specs. The design requirement was to “Store data durably, with 99.99% availability“. That’s pretty nice, and translates to less than an hour of downtime per year. But their SLA quotes figures that are a factor 10 to 100 lower; you’ll get a 10% service credit if uptime is between 99 and 99.9%. If it’s down more (anywhere between 1% and 100% of a given month), you get a 25% service credit. For that month. If you ask for it yourself. And have server logs to show the failed requests. And Amazon is one of the few providers that actually publishes an SLA in the first place…
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