The Greatest Risk to Cloud Computing ? The Vista Effect.

The num­ber of the fail­ures in Cloud Computing is rising rap­idly. Google Mail has had a num­ber of out­ages of more than 12 hours and other Google Apps are hav­ing sta­bil­ity and up time prob­lems. Microsoft Azure was out for 22 hours, Amazon, Magnolia, Carbonite, Media Temple are just some of the oth­ers who are hav­ing problems.

So for­get secur­ity, orches­tra­tion or costs. The per­cep­tion of always avail­able is meet­ing the engin­eer­ing real­ity of “we can do it most of the time for that money”

The Vista Effect

Many people say that Microsoft Vista is now ready for use. Some three years after it was released and two ser­vice packs, it seems ready for use but no-​​one is buying.

No-​​one believes Microsoft. The rivers of blood and bile about its prob­lems and per­form­ance, bad drivers, no back­ward com­pat­ib­il­ity, no drivers for old hard­ware, drivers not installing when upgrad­ing from Windows XP etc. etc. etc. The vast major­ity of users don’t know any of this, all they know is that Vista is a lemon and you shouldn’t buy it.

Clouds and the Vista effect

It won’t take much the in cur­rent envir­on­ment for Cloud Computing to get the same repu­ta­tion. And with the levels of inter­de­pend­ence between sub-​​systems, one out­age is likely to take out an entire sys­tem with a single fail­ure. Most vex­ing, is that the out­age will be caused by human error.

The levels of integ­ra­tion and test­ing needed to build a fault tol­er­ant cloud sys­tem are not avail­able today. Put simply, if Google can’t do it with their money and tal­ent pool, then it really is not pos­sible. Assembling a Cloud your­self with mul­tiple vendors and inco­her­ent tech­no­lo­gies is not going to have a global up time of five nines includ­ing upgrades and 6

Even the best run enter­prises, with enorm­ous budgets and resources, are still reg­u­larly plan­ning shut­downs of vari­ous sys­tems to per­form upgrades.

You can’t shake Bad News

It will only take a few more out­ages of the major “Cloud Computing” vendors and the mar­ket per­cep­tion will be set. Any future mar­ket­ing and sales will need to over­come the objec­tion of poor performance.

More import­antly, the CIO will start to real­ise that Cloud Computing is no dif­fer­ent to what they already have. And pos­sibly, much much worse because he has no con­trol over the out­come (although, the abil­ity to blame a third party is vert attract­ive to some organisations).

Thats when the Vista effect will have stalled or stopped Cloud Computing.

Please rate this post:

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...