If you’re a geek, you know by now that there was a Gmail outage around 1 AM on 24th Feb (supposedly today) EST. And if you are a geek-ier person, then you know Gmail runs or uses already established Cloud of Google. Cloud, wait a second, can applications running on Cloud Computing architecture fail? Can an application which has essentially immense resources at its disposal fail like this? Do we need better Fault Tolerant and resource management architectures than this?
Also, trying some stuff on Amazon’s service, I realized (I was a great fan of Cloud before) that there are a lot drawbacks and the biggest one being Dependency on a specific Cloud technology/company, that too for eons. Seriously, I do think that this type of architecture is so specific to a company implementing it that it is almost against the norms of what Web stands for - Universality.
I remember working with Axis2 (the Web Services SOAP engine). It didn’t feel sinful while writing a Web Service wrapper for an existing C function for local company and deploy it, which would be consumed by a PHP client. Why? Because I was actually taking a C function and making it universally (Web) accessible (or at least for that company). I felt that I was pushing the existing architecture towards web standards. Working with Amazon’s Cloud wasn’t such a feeling. It was like working with another Microsoft kind of a product.
On the other hand you might argue with the example of data loss at Ma.gnolia. It wasn’t running on a Cloud architecture from some big firm like Amazon or Google (and it was bound to fail?) It was running on 4 Mac Mini’s. (I have been reading this and have not been able to get any citation for this but it was definitely not Cloud). I believe that Cloud computing has to emerge or evolve in itself and produce a standard. I think there has to be a conformity to certain architecture that each of these companies adhere to. Just like the idea it is based on: Grids. Otherwise, if I have to use their architecture for my new application, I would be scared of depending upon it and of course would think twice of migrating my current app to this architecture.
Meanwhile, I am happy working with the limited features my web hosting provides (for cheap) and forget about Fault Tolerance for the time being.