Outages Could Give Amazon an Edge

Amazon.com’s nearly eight-hour outage to its S3 cloud storage service on Sunday, July 20, might have irked some customers and made headlines, but in the end, it may be Amazon having the upper hand.
Analyst James Staten told Systems Management News that outages and issues with cloud computing should be expected because it is in its initial phases.
Staten said the cloud computing growing pain period may take several years, but there likely won’t be an exact point in time where all issues with cloud computing are cured. Maturity will happen on a company-by-company basis, he indicated.
“Amazon, being the first in the market, has the biggest target on their head,” Staten said. “They’ve had the biggest outages, and they’ve been working to address it. I expect they’ll be extremely resilient to these kinds of outages in the next year to year-and-a-half.”
As such, Amazon may have an advantage over other companies in the cloud computing market because they are taking their bumps and bruises right now. They will experience their outages, muck through their cloud computing initiation phase, and should learn from their mistakes to get a better feel for this whole cloud computing idea. When cloud computing becomes everywhere, Amazon will be way ahead of everyone in cloud maturity.
The key for Amazon is to keep making sure that these outages get smaller and smaller as time goes by, and their “emergency” response gets better and better. Smaller companies that are new to the cloud computing market, like Joyent and GridLayer, will also have their own bumps along the way, but don’t have the same exposure and “probably won’t end up in the New York Times,” as Staten said.
However, as the bigger corporations start partaking in cloud initiatives, they could well find themselves playing catch-up with Amazon.
-- Jeff Feinman