Blogger says as equipment ages, we’ll start to see the signs
George Watt (VP of Corporate Strategy at CA Technologies) makes an interesting point on CA’s “Cloud Storm Chasers” blog. The cloud market is still a young industry, but it has been around for more than a few years now. Technology doesn’t last forever, and older hardware is more prone to becoming faulty.
So, if some of the infrastructure that cloud providers run their platforms on is becoming a little long in the tooth, so to speak, there could be a chance of more outages, he says.
Here’s Watt’s reasoning:
“Cloud computing is fairly mature and some of that equipment will start to show its age. Some of it will start to malfunction, and some will not be able to handle increased capacity. In some cases a simple thing, such as an OS or firmware upgrade or patch, might cause older equipment’s performance to degrade, possibly significantly. In essence, cloud providers will now have to deal with the same issues that more mature deployments have been dealing with for years.”
Read the full blog post here.
Do you believe it?
Personally, as someone who tracks the cloud market daily, it seems there have been fewer cloud outages during the past year or so. Sure every few months Amazon’s cloud hiccups – in fact that just happened a few weeks ago. But it seems like that used to happen every few weeks. Now, it’s happening every few months. Are providers getting better at making their system’s fault tolerant? Are customers designing their platforms to be resistant to cloud outages?
Whatever the case, a good rule of thumb for the cloud is prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
Senior Writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing for Network World and NetworkWorld.com. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.
