Speaking of cloud reliability now Amazon is down

So, right after I did my last post on the need for cloud data services SLAs to meet enterprise expectations I got a ping that Amazon is down — I went to the main Amazon URL and the EC2 URL and got the dreaded “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable”.

Wow!

How will cloud services mature to meet enteprise service levels

In reading the latest post from Louis Gray (Disqus’ Downtime) I learned that he is suffering from a data outage — namely his blog comment service appears to be down and with it all his access to his blog’s comments. Now it appears comments are back on.

Over breakfast I was talking about this and other cloud issues with a friend so I found this interesting that when I sat down to see what was going on the first thing I ran across was an example of unreliable data access from a cloud service. We were talking about how even though there have been some great advances in SaaS, PaaS, and also understanding of service-oriented architecture the enterprise just brings higher levels of service expectations then a lot of the new providers appear to grasp.

In enterprise IT shops services have to run — the business depends on the information that helps people work, supports the customers or puts the products and services in the hands of the right people. Sure, this case is blog comments, but what if it were data representing communication with the customer service department? contract settlement between partners? order processing? For SaaS solutions to become adopted beyond the early adopters and on wide scale they are going to have to meet enteprise standards or service that approach five 9s for reliability or they simply will not be used for critical information and business processes.