by David LeMieux
I have been doing some thinking about cloud computing lately. Really, I think the most reliable "cloud computing" is distributed computing, like the Folding@Home project. Other services, like Amazon's S3, are weak in that they have a single point of failure. Just yesterday there were reports of the S3 service having major outages. While the entire internet did not come to a collapse, it certainly does make one stop and think.
My friend Jared and I have talked about the fact that soon people are going to realize that they don't control their information any more. Google, Facebook, MySpace, et al. are the companies that control your data, and while some companies are more open than others, it is scary to think that if, for one reason or another, one of these companies went bad, failed, or exploded tons of valuable information would be lost.
So, while cloud computing and internet service, like those that Amazon provides, may be valuable, can they really be trusted? When you are running your own web service on their backbone and their service collapses what do you tell your own customers? That it is Amazon's fault? Taking a post by Seth Godin one step further: If you use my web service and it fails because my own service provider messed up it is not their fault, it is my fault for not having backups and better controls in place.
I do not run a major web service and to be perfectly honest I am being hypocritical because I currently do not have the resources to run my own servers and so I depend on someone else to do it for me. But I suppose that it my point. I DON'T run a web service that has millions of dependent users, so I don't need better control. If this blog were to go down, only 4 people would notice.
What is going to happen when we all realize, when it is too late, that we have depended too much on others to manage our own information? I don't even want to think about it.