I love the panic in the air over the Google outage (last night at dinner it was pointed out that the Google outage was getting more news coverage than the fires in California). That brings me to this, from David Coursey:

What have we learned from Google's latest outage? That 99.9 percent uptime doesn't matter during the other one-tenth of one percent. Yesterday's outage was not Google's first. They don't happen very often, but they do happen often enough that anyone seriously considering Google for cloud computing ought to think again.

Well. The entire Google cloud (or Amazon's, or Microsoft's, or anyone's, for that matter) is pretty new, and in software terms, pretty immature. Cast your mind back if you will to the late 90's, and the joys of using Windows 98 (or ME) with Office. We all got into the habit of saving early and often, because there was no telling when the next blue screen might show up. Microsoft has mostly solved that problem; XP is pretty stable, never mind Vista or Windows 7. I think the cloud initiatives are in roughly the Windows 98/ME stage of their evolution: useful, but not completely reliable yet.

The pundits (like Coursey) who think things will stay like that probably also saw a future filled with blue screens in 1998 and 1999...

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, stability, maturity