A cautionary utility computing tale – or the dark side of Mashups
Check out this post from Between the Lines:
[snip…] "Yesterday Amazon's S3 service suffered an outage that lasted more than long enough to miss the company's self-imposed goal of 99.99% availability, at least for the next couple of months. Last November, Google Calendar was unavailable for the better part of a day. And famously, Salesforce.com suffered a string of outages this time last year. Unfortunately, my business relies on all three of these services." [snip…]
Recently I talked to someone who was trying to convince himself that they should built their new product on top of Amazon's Grid Computing platform (EC2). I know of another company who has built their new product on top of Amazon's Distributed Storage Service, S3. In our own case, the thumbnails for BlogBridge Expert Guides and Library come from Amazon's Alexa Site Thumbnails.
Cautionary tale indeed. It's the other side of the wonderful world of mashups and web 2.0 and web services and all that jazz. If I build my product on the back of your service, then the quality of what I deliver depends on your carrying through on your promises. Not a very strong position to be in.
This is fundamentally different from building a product that uses components (i.e. operating systems, libraries) delivered by others because in the end I do get a complete product that I can test and verify before I deliver it to a customer.
Just food for [GEEKY] thought.
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