On Thursday, April 21st, some of the hypest social media website like Foursquare and Quora were unavailable due to a failure of the Amazon’s cloud computing solution.
For those of you who have never heard about cloud computing (which I don’t think you may be a lot, as I discuss frequently about that topic on this blog), Cloud computing is a new way to approach Internet hosting: Instead of having one server hosting a website whatever its traffic is (depending on the season, on the day, and so on), cloud computing aim to propose a hosting solution which adapts itself upon the traffic of a specific website.
Thanks to cloud computing a website can:
o Adapt its bandwidth and hosting capacity depending on the traffic of its website at a specific time.
o Save money by lowering and rising its hosting needs upon the demand.
Even though cloud computing is seen by expert as the future of the Internet (which I surely agree), there are still some main disadvantage to the solution. Especially, your data is placed into a cloud which you don’t own nor are able to locate it either.
This is the issue that Foursquare experienced. The cloud system collapsed, resulting in the service not being available.
Now, these kind of issues remain rare, and now that the system is becoming popular and adopted by a lot of CTOs, then it is becoming more secured. Nevertheless, it is very important to back up these kind of initiatives as a failure is a possibility you can not ignore.
For those of you who have never heard about cloud computing (which I don’t think you may be a lot, as I discuss frequently about that topic on this blog), Cloud computing is a new way to approach Internet hosting: Instead of having one server hosting a website whatever its traffic is (depending on the season, on the day, and so on), cloud computing aim to propose a hosting solution which adapts itself upon the traffic of a specific website.
Thanks to cloud computing a website can:
o Adapt its bandwidth and hosting capacity depending on the traffic of its website at a specific time.
o Save money by lowering and rising its hosting needs upon the demand.
Even though cloud computing is seen by expert as the future of the Internet (which I surely agree), there are still some main disadvantage to the solution. Especially, your data is placed into a cloud which you don’t own nor are able to locate it either.
This is the issue that Foursquare experienced. The cloud system collapsed, resulting in the service not being available.
Now, these kind of issues remain rare, and now that the system is becoming popular and adopted by a lot of CTOs, then it is becoming more secured. Nevertheless, it is very important to back up these kind of initiatives as a failure is a possibility you can not ignore.
