Cloud Computing and Vulnerability
“Cloud computing” being the buzzword du jour we’re all being told how it’s going to change everything blah blah blah. Apparently it will even get rid of desktop/laptop computers according to a Twit I listened to recently – we’ll all be using our phones for everything. Coding on my phone seems distrinctly unlikely!
But there are downsides to “the cloud” (would those be storm clouds? Lightning?) and plenty of people have mentioned them. Privacy concerns. Security concerns. Really, the usual concerns for any Internet technology.
One concern that is the idea of vulnerability. Media Temple is a popular web hosting company that is know for providing quality service – and for its (apparently) innovative “grid computing” – which seems to be a sort of cloud computing for web hosting. It’s a hosting “solution” that operates on a distributed computing metaphor. Customers’ sites are hosted on a network of computers rather than single machines.
Normally this is not a bad idea at all – after all one server can die and the effect is minimized (or there’s no effect) for the other clients. But on Wednesday May 6th something went very wrong with the system that provides storage for some of their clients. And so, something like 15,000 websites went down.
Now, in a traditional web hosting scenario, multiple customers’ sites are hosted on a single server, spreading the cost of that server out amongst those clients. Of course, if that server dies, there will likely be some down-time for those clients. But at the same time when that server dies – the damage is limited to those clients who were hosted on it. So maybe a few dozen sites are affected, not thousands.
I have no idea what went wrong with Media Temple’s grid service, but it seems to me it shows that the whole cloud computing thing doesn’t mean we should just pitch more established ways of doing things out the window.
For example, rather than having google mail handle all my email for my website (which I certainly could do) I’ve opted to stick with the usual POP/IMAP mail server thing – and have gmail pull the email off of my server. I still can access my email using google’s great webmail service, but this way – if gmail shut down tomorrow (obviously unlikely) I’m minimally affected – all my old email is still on my server.Perhaps more likely – if gmail suddenly became an expensive service tomorrow, I’m not locked in…
Like with so many things in the online world, redundancy is not bad thing.
