Obscured By Clouds – Google Edition

(Obligatory Pink Floyd reference included)

This afternoon we get another data point showing that despite the exciting promise of cloud computing, the realities of managing large scale infrastructure insist on rearing their ugly heads. TechCrunch is reporting that Google Apps had an outage today which caused the service to be completely down.

There’s two serious problems with this outage:

1- The reports of service outages arrive long after anyone who depends on the services can possibly do anything to mitigate their effect.

2- The services themselves seem incapable of providing any visibility into the circumstances that might lead to future outages.

On the first point, despite my affinity for TechCrunch, I think it’s rather sad that that is the place where the outage is most prominently chronicled. After all, TechCrunch is a news site. Counting on news sites to explain why your cloud dependent app is broken is like finding out from CNN that your house is on fire.

The second point just shows how these cloud services seem dependent on blogs (again, news technology) as a means to report the status of their services. Even TechCrunch points out that the Google Apps blog doesn’t even mention the outage. Other clouds rely on blogs such as this one, this one, or maybe even this one (from our good friends at Mosso). These are all places where outages can be discussed, but not the right means for people to find out whether it was their application that crashed, or the cloud that it depends on.

Without this type of visibility and transparency (as TC’s article points out) it will be difficult for serious , mission critical applications to be built using clouds. Even if the company providing the cloud is as famous and respected as Google and Amazon both are.

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