A cautionary utility computing tale - or the dark side of Mashups
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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.
Technorati Tags: mashup, mashupcamp, web2.0
Popularity: 3% [?]
January 6th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
It’s a trade-off. If you were maintaining your storage service, what’s your uptime? How reliable is your RAID array and backup strategy? On the other hand, when you maintain the whole thing, you’re empowered.
A friend of mine recently switched his self-hosted mail server to the GMail hosted domain service. It reduced his spam enormously. I’m not sure I could do the same. I have problems with my mail server, but at least I know that they’re *my* problems. I can deal with them whenver I feel like getting around to it.
To offer an analogy, this is also what I like about owning my home. Sure, things go wrong, but it’s my responsibility when they do, not some flaky person I might not trust as much…
January 7th, 2007 at 12:07 am
Am I missing something here?
Isn’t this the potential downside of many hosted services, including BlogBridge itself.
Or does BlogBridge’s offline working capability reduce the need for “five nines” uptime?
January 7th, 2007 at 11:05 am
Jered: Actually I use Gmail as my mail server myself. I guess the difference for me is something that I do for myself, vs. something that I build a business around and sell to others. At that point I am exposing my own business commitments to the reliability of the sub service provider.
And the same point in response to David. If you were to build your business based on the service delivered by BlogBridge service, you would have a legitimate concern there too. (You are right that the BlogBridge aggregator works quite well even if the server is down.)
But you both made me realize a bias (justified, I think) in my thinking. Why don’t I feel exposed that ServerBeach (where we host our servers) is a sub-service provider, but I do say that someone building a business dependent on S3 or some of the other web service providers should be nervous?
Because I sense (this is the bias) that Amazon et al are providing all those services as as much more experimental (”Yeah, we are hard-core Web 2.0″) and that they don’t have the deeply ingrained service mentality and SLA focus that someone like ServerBeach has.
I guess it has to do with a one-of-a-kind service (S3) and a mature, competitive market.