Why I Hesitate To Use Cloud Computing
Amazon’s S3 service appears to be down today. While I don’t have anything on S3, I view this outage as a good thing. I have been considering using Amazon’s cloud computing services (S3, EC2, SimpleDB) for statzen. I have been hesitant to build a system on their architecture because it is not easily replicable.
It is one thing to build on a proprietary system when you own access to that system (i.e. building on Sun or Windows). It is quite another thing to allow yourself to be locked in to a service that would be difficult to move away from and you are at the constant mercy of your vendor.
No one knows how long S3 will be down; it could be up by the time this post publishes. It could be that S3 is down for days. What then? It is not like you can run a backup system on Google’s S3 or on a self hosted solution. It would require reworking your application architecture to compensate for vendor error. That is an unacceptable risk to me.
I have been on the fence about using Amazon’s services. I like the idea of them, but the dependence scares me. Today’s outage pretty much seals the deal for me.
Update: Local Nashville tech company Sitening has more details of the outage.
Really though, all systems are vulnerable to the same outages. It’s no different from running your own network or using somebody else’s high availability system.
The big thing here is that we wouldn’t be able to do half of the stuff that we do if it wasn’t for a system like S3. So all in all, it only shows how dependent we are on their service, not that their service or solution sucks.
I agree that all systems are vulnerable to outages. The Planet went down last year. However, with something like hosted servers the system can be moved to a new provider. Something like AWS (and S3 and SimpleDB in particular) there is no way to move those to a new provider without rewriting code. It would be different if there was an alternative provider (like if Google or Yahoo or eBay replicated the S3 and SimpleBD APIs).
I hear you, I just still think that AWS is the best bang for the buck, and I really don’t expect for it to experience outages like that again.