Cloud Computing Failure

I had a good laugh this week reading about all the consternation about Gmail going down on Monday. If it were only the general public feeling this way I would be more sympathetic, but this is from technologists, geeks even. What's all the fuss about?

A common refrain is that Google is trusted and now that trust is stained. I say baloney. Nothing is certain, and certainly not perfection. One thing I've learned from decades in this business is certainty of availability of communications, computer resources and data is impossible. Sure a system can be made very reliable, which those of us in the business often term high availability, but fail-safe? Nope.

Think of all the things that can go wrong:

• Internet connection goes down or you are out of range of a connection
• ISP or upstream internet congestion or fault, whether caused by act of some god or human
• Server or computer failure, hardware and software
• Fault propagation, where one failure cascades through a network

There's much more. No, the problem isn't that failures occur it is that we are so often unprepared for them. It is far too easy to trust someone else to worry about it for us, even though they can't, and don't, guarantee perfection, and then to whine about it.

Do you keep backups? I know better, yet when I very nearly lost a hard drive recently my backups were not up to snuff. If your internet connection goes down, do you have a ready alternative? Dial-up or even a drive to the nearest Wi-Fi hot spot could serve. If your email is critical do you have a backup? You could auto-forward all email to a separate service, even Gmail, since email data is often difficult to backup and restore. If you use a CRM like that of Salesforce, is your data exportable into a standard format, and do you do so regularly? You should. Backup software inconvenient to use? Find a data buddy, network your computers and then you can conveniently dump your critical files to each other's computers. A USB memory stick also serves nicely.

Murphy's Law says that things will go wrong, especially when you're sure they can't. Services out there in the internet cloud are no exception. Take the trouble to have a disaster plan. Otherwise, the victims ought to do their complaining in front of a mirror.