Cloud not perfect yet - Amazon's cloud world stopped for hours

Thursday night I switched my Apple TV on to watch Monk through Netflix. But instead of watching Monk I got a message that Netflix is not available at the moment. The reason for this was that the Amazon could was down.
Therefore my world broke down.


The problems, which began early Thursday morning and had not been completely repaired by the end of the day, affected sites including Quora.com, Reddit.com, GroupMe.com and Scvngr.com and Netflix.com which all posted messages to their visitors about the issue. Most of the sites were inaccessible for hours, and others were only partly operational.

The Web companies use Amazon’s cloud-based service to serve their Web sites, applications and files. Amazon’s customers include start-ups like the social networking site Foursquare but also big companies like Pfizer and Nasdaq.

Amazon, which is a leader in this business, lets these companies rent space on its servers and take advantage of its big data centers and computing power. But that gives the companies little control if the servers fail.

Everybody is talking to go into the cloud, but the Amazon failure is a clear example that cloud is not ready yet. In understand that many companies are in one time down, but the difference with cloud is, that if the cloud is down then hundreds of companies are down. Do we want to trust our business to be in the cloud? Imagine you use a CRM and your server our network goes down. Your team will try everything to get it running again. If your CRM is in the cloud and the cloud goes down, then you have to rely on the cloud owner to get it back running. You can imagine if your own system is down many employees would call the IT department to complain, which does slow the process down just because of the mental stress.
Imagine something like Amazon goes down, how many people will call and put stress on amazon? The engineers will feel it and make it harder for them to get it running. Granted they have more engineers working on such issue than your company might have, but they report to Amazon and not you.

I am friend of the cloud but when we go in the cloud, we should always think twice how critical a meltdown would be for company. And for really important applications we should have a distributed cloud cluster. Using Amazon and Microsoft Azure as an example as a fallback. When one is down the other can take over. It is a little more complex to set up and think through the architecture but helps to stay online.

Unfortunately this makes the cloud more expensive which is already not cheap.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Mobile.me maybe soon free

Me, an old mobile.me customer (when it was still called mac.com) is paying every year $159 for an extended mobile.me family account. Since years I am paying it because of the benefits, but I never liked to pay so much. There are many other services for email and data storage free or much cheaper. The most famous one is for sure Google. Google offers a lot of cool features which are free, even cloud documents like Excel, Word etc without having the need to own such software to make changes in the documents.

But I kept the mobile.me accounts because all my devices are Apple products. The really beauty of mobile.me is the total sync of mail accounts, contacts, photos and calendar and even favorites. It is just amazing how well you think it works. As soon you have a new computer you can use your mobile.me account on this computer and all email accounts, contacts etc are synched. However it does not work well as it is supposed. Over the years all my contact and calendar entries got dirty. I had many contacts 10 or 20 times in my contact app and birthday reminders up to 30 times. The biggest issue is that you can't define one device as master and therefore the data gets dirty when you have many devices, it is not really good solved by Apple. Even if the data looks exact the same it still happens. Just last week I did spend 5 hours to clean the data. On such days I am asking myself why I am paying for this service so much.

One good thing with mobile.me is the total integration with I-tunes, iPhone/iPad, iPhoto and iWeb. It is so easy to share your photos over mobile.me or to generate cool looking webpages using iWeb an mobile.me account.
Nevertheless not to forget the ability to locate your iPhone and to locker erase it remotely in case you lost it.

Again a good (not perfect) service which is clear too expensive. I actually only know Apple geeks who have mobile.me accounts. Apple is now a mainstream company and can't afford anymore to offer too expensive services. First they opened the app world on MacOS to offer software much cheaper than the CD version. Now as a logical consequence mobile.me might go free.

Mobile.me is the Apple cloud system, still only limited to certain programs, but I believe the mobile.me cloud will soon offer music in the cloud (which you can partly do right now by saving your songs in the mobile.me folder on your mac).

The rumors about new version of mobile me started when Apple end of february selling mobile me in their online store. Students are recommended to use the 60 days trial for now till new version is out.

I believe Apple will have a free standard version for maybe 5GB and then offer more services and data storage for payed service.

My subscription year is running out in June and hopefully till then the new mobile.me is available. I remember a few years ago Apple had problems to merge .mac accounts with mobile.me. Because of the trouble I got 6 months in total free.

I guess we will know the latest at the Worldwide Developer Conference 2011 starting June 5 how the new mobile.me will look like.

Or as early as next month. Charles Starrett, Senior Editor of iLounge, cited "a trusted source" saying that Apple will announce a free version of MobileMe next month


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