ANTenna Blog -- Business & E-Business

Much was made of the problems Amazon's Web services had last week. Its data storage service was down for a few hours, leaving many smaller businesses in the lurch. Is cloud computing not the knight in Web storage armor small businesses had hoped for?

Amazon's Simple Storage Service has been a boon to many smaller businesses, allowing them to store and retrieve lots of data on the Web. But when something goes wrong suddenly the latest, hottest technology doesn't look so promising.

So notes Alex Iskold on Read Write Web. Writing about the outage at Amazon Web services, he points out: "When the backbone collapses, so do our favorite services. This makes us mad. It makes us say things like: well, maybe we shouldn't be using the cloud. Or things like: why can't we get 99% uptime? Or: isn't this what an SLA is for?"

All the agreements in the world aren't going to prevent an outage here or there and of course companies such as Amazon would do well to inform their customers quickly and efficiently of what's going on -- or risk the wrath of their users. (Blackberry users can attest to that as well.)

But Iskold continues: "Software and hardware, like any system, can never be perfect. When power outages happen we get frustrated, but we understand that this is a fact of life. Any sufficiently complex system, like a power grid or Amazon Web Services, is bound to go down. There is little that can be done to assure us that it never will. Because of this, single outages are not good measures of quality of service. Albert Wenger said something to me recently that stuck in my head: We live in a stochastic world, but people fail to grasp it because all they experience is right now. So is it really true - is cloud computing a bad idea? Of course not. It is a wonderful, powerful idea."

It is wonderful, it is powerful and it allows smaller businesses to do things that they used to only dream of being able to do when they were as big as their larger sized competitors. It levels the playing field and, as Iskold notes, smaller businesses should not be scared away from the possibilities cloud computing offers them.

They also shouldn't try to go it alone. He notes: "In this day and age, build vs. buy is a complete no-brainer, especially for startups. Whatever is part of your core business you build. Everything else you buy. If your business really does require a custom cloud solution, then you have to build it. But the chances that the Amazon Web Services stack, once fully built out, would not fit your needs are slim to none. By focusing on what truly makes you unique and different you have the chance to beat the competition. Otherwise, if you keep on reinventing the wheel you won't have the time and resources to advance your real product."

Cloud computing is part of the future for many smaller businesses and Iskold's conclusion makes that clear: "The incident last week is in no way going to deter cloud computing or even Amazon Web Services. We are witnessing a fundamental shift in our ability to compute and this is just the beginning. Amazon is at the forefront of making massively parallel, web scale compute services available to the world. Free from the need to solve the scalability problems, startups are able to focus on the specific problems that their product or service is trying to solve. All of this is happening while the cost of hardware, bandwidth and services overall keep dropping. Truly, we are reaching for the sky through the computing clouds."

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