Ministry of Innovation / Business of Technology

Cloud computing promise still stormy with reliability issues

Even as Google builds its Chrome OS to utilize cloud computing resources …

Yesterday's announcement of Google's Chrome OS plans were met with plenty of discussion about what it might mean for the future of computing. The OS is essentially a lightweight version of Linux designed to run the company's Chrome browser to access Google's (or other third-party) cloud computing services, such as Gtalk, Gmail, Google Docs, and more. While there are numerous benefits of using such cloud services—like data persistence across multiple machines—what happens when the servers that run those services run into trouble, burn down, or lose power?

Unfortunately, it seems, there aren't any new answers since we examined this issue almost one year ago. In the last week alone, there have been several high profile outages at data centers that host sites, such as video site DailyMotion, credit card authorization service, and Microsoft’s Bing Travel. Even the Google App Engine—a platform for third-parties to run their own cloud services—experienced performance issues that resulted in high latency and even data loss.

Rackspace Hosting, which provides servers that run untold numbers of websites, experienced a power outage Tuesday in its Dallas data center for as long as 45 minutes. Once power was restored, though, it took some sites several hours to come back fully. It was the second such power outage for the company's Dallas data center in just over a week, though it's not particularly common; as TechCrunch noted, the last time the company had a major outage was in November 2007. However, the recent incidents illustrate the problem—there are still risks associated with using the cloud.

Technical risks aren't the only kind that affect cloud customers—what happens if your cloud service provider goes out of business? In this economy, it could conceivably happen.

While these high-profile cloud outages—whether technical or economic in origin—certainly impact consumers, the main problem with them is that a steady drip of cloud failure news greatly increases the anxiety of IT professionals who already have concerns about using cloud services in their own shops.

It hurts to be on the cutting edge

Many of the IT pros who are evaluating cloud services name reliability as a major concern with cloud services, and have been doing so in the Ars forums and in closed-door sessions for over a year now. Many of these folks are at large companies and are used to having control over and responsibility for all of the servers that the business uses, so the idea of putting parts of their business on rented, "black box"-style cloud services makes them uneasy.

Many of the vendors that we hear from either downplay the reliability concerns or offer some version of "it hurts to be on the cutting edge." And with this last response, they do have a point. Often1, the decision to use cloud services instead of in-house systems is a decision that's made for reasons of either cost and flexibility (in the case of SaaS) or development speed (in the case of actual cloud infrastructure).

So the developers in your IT department may love the fact that they can immediately dial up thousands of virtual servers from a cloud provider like Rackspace (the infrastructure-as-a-service tier) or code to an infinitely scalable platform like Google's App Engine (the platform-as-a-service tier), but it's up to IT management to strike the balance between rapidly developing applications at Internet scale and planning for the impact on the business that any cloud-related downtime will have. And the higher up in the cloud stack you go to rent your services, the more vulnerable you are to downtime because you're more locked into that particular provider's solution.

Ultimately, the cloud is here to stay, and cloud outages are here to stay, so enterprise cloud customers will have to carefully balance the downtime risks with the cost and agility benefits of using the different tiers of cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS).

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