There are clouds everywhere, and they are multiplying in both number and size at a rapid pace. Of course, I'm not talking about the weather, but about cloud computing. What happens when your stuff is inside a cloud that disappears?
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What is a cloud anyway? The term encompasses a wide variety of things, but for this purpose, we are talking about services that exist on the Internet. You can put your digital data (photos, videos, favorite music, and whatever else you can think of) "out there" and access it later from another location. You can share stuff with your family and friends. Businesses can do serious computing on computers that are also in the cloud, owned by a third party, rather than having to have their own servers in-house.
Well-known examples of cloud-based services include Facebook and Gmail. Each of these services store huge amounts of your data: email, photos, and arguments with your friends and enemies among them. The key point to remember is that your data isn't stored locally on your computer. Your email doesn't live on your personal hard drive, unless you download and store it. This is why you can move from place to place, device to device, and access all of your email from wherever you happen to be at any given moment.
Facebook users upload something like 350 million photos per day, with a staggering total of 250 billion so far (and these are last year's numbers). Every photo you have ever uploaded to Facebook, and not deleted, is still available on that service, somewhere. Over the years, Facebook has had to change not just the volume of storage, but the very nature of the storage itself. Recent photos are available pretty much instantly, stored and replicated on multiple servers within their infrastructure. They are now in the process of migrating older material to so-called cold storage. With racks holding tens of thousands of Blu-Ray discs, you're way beyond mere gigabytes and terrabytes; this is petabytes territory. Accessing your older files from such storage takes some extra time, but at the benefit of huge savings in both hardware and electricity, for data that is rarely, even if ever again, accessed.
You may not be aware of a huge cloud service called Amazon Web Services (AWS). But it's big, really big. If you want to have a little website of your own hosted somewhere, you can create it on AWS. It's cheap, easy to set up (YMMV, of course), and convenient. Amazon takes care of all the server and hardware infrastructure, and stores your website's data. You can transact business with your customers, or host a blog, whatever you want to do on the web. And AWS scales up to host big business. Lots of prominent companies are also AWS customers. You pay for the computing resources you actually use, whether you are big or small. And you never have to touch hardware, or even know where it is. It's outsourcing on a potentially grand scale.
So what happens to all this when things go wrong?
As InfoWorld reported last year, Google Drive had a failure lasting several hours. If you're trying to conduct business online, and suddenly your files are unavailable for hours at a time, you might be thinking the cloud isn't so great after all. And with these really big services, outages can affect millions of customers simultaneously.
Around the same time, LinkedIn was unavailable for a while. Both of the people still using LinkedIn were probably upset. Then Microsoft's Outlook/Hotmail service was down for 16 hours. The same InfoWorld report links to an earlier 2012 posting, about an AWS outage. The root cause was a power failure after a severe storm, but when the AWS regional cloud went down for several hours, it took Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, Heroku, and quite a few other websites with it.
The cloud providers lavishly praise themselves for providing backups, removing the need for their customers to do so. But this is false praise, because when the cloud goes down, if your business is in there, it's down too. If you as an individual can't get to your Facebook timeline, you might be annoyed. If Netflix can't provide movies to its paying customers, those customers are going to be pissed. And they will be pissed at Netflix, because how are they supposed to know that it's the AWS host's fault?
Cloud services are promoted as including backup. But you might need backup for the entire service. So do you replicate everything from one cloud into another? That's not going to be cheap. Or easy. Or in some cases, possible.
What if your cloud doesn't just have an outage, but goes out of business? Nirvanix is a case in point. From tomsitpro.com:
Greg Schulz, founder and senior adviser at Minneapolis-based consulting firm StorageIO, says that while Nirvanix was a high-profile cloud storage provider, the company itself, which shut down with little notice on October 1, 2013, was a niche player and did not hold a significant market share compared to cloud industry giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
OK, a niche player, not one of the big ones. But if you were a Nirvanix customer and suddenly the company went out of business, you might have your business in a bag that they were holding, then dropped. Oh well, at least you got your
two weeks notice.
A few months ago, the cloud service company Code Spaces ceased operations abruptly. They had been providing a service where software developers could share and distribute code for projects they were working on. But Code Spaces screwed up big time, and hackers were able to gain access to their systems and not only launch denial of service attacks, but delete masses of customer files. It was so bad that the entire site was essentially non-recoverable.
Western Digital, the well-known hard drive manufacturer, ventured into the cloud business with "My Cloud", a sort of personal cloud service for home use. You buy their hardware and attach it to your network at home, and WD's service makes your files available to you no matter where you are. So your files stay on your property, but you can access them even when travelling. This is as opposed to, say, Dropbox, in which you transfer your files to Dropbox servers on the public cloud. WD has a great idea. Except that, as many users complain, the My Cloud service has "failed more often than it's worked".
Back to AWS for a moment. It seems that AWS is losing huge piles of money, while increasing its usage by leaps and bounds, and slashing prices continually. It's hard to filter out exactly what is going on though, as Amazon lumps AWS along with a bunch of other things called "Other" in its accounting statements. Amazon may be following a strategy of increasing market share, taking big losses, in order to squeeze out competitors. Cisco calls this the "race to zero", and says it is not following suit.
Meanwhile, the CIA, yes that CIA, is investing heavily in becoming an AWS customer.
Despite lingering debate about the security of today's cloud services, the CIA has publicly acknowledged that it is investing approximately $600 million with Amazon Web Services to meet its escalating big data and global intelligence needs.
Security concerns? On the Internet? No-one could have imagined...
And finally, I'm too chicken to put my data into this egg.
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October 14, 2014
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