[Discuss] What Happens when a cloud service shuts down

[tmetro-blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> These days, the buzz word is cloud. You put stuff into a cloud, you
> expect your data to be safe and accessible. 
> ...assume you are using a backup service and it suddenly declares
> bankruptcy.

If you are talking specifically about cloud-based backup services, then
the answer is that it is a backup, not primary service. If the provider
goes away, you find another.

The general answer applicable to all cloud services is that you apply
redundancy, just as you would in any other situation. Unfortunately the
proprietary nature of most SaaS applications make this impossible. At
best, your provider might provide a way of backing up your data outside
of their cloud. (As Google does for many of its services.) But having
your data without the app may be of limited value, at least in the short
term.

Ideally this is why open source is still important, and your first
choice for a SaaS should be a hosted open source application. The next
best option is to deploy an open source application yourself to a PaaS
or IaaS provider.

I've been hoping that we'd see more open source apps in hosted form, and
we have seen some, but not really wide spread. Take for example virtual
PBXs. It's entirely feasible that we could have seen an "Asterisk
hosting" market develop much like web hosting, but it didn't happen.
There is maybe one vendor that I know of that provides Asterisk hosting.
The rest stick a proprietary GUI on top, or use an entirely proprietary
solution. If things don't work out with your PBX provider, there is no
way to download your config and prompts and upload them to another
provider.


> ...should be in several different locations fully mirrored. ...
> Companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, HP are huge and have
> multiple datacenters so if one datacenter gets destroyed by a
> hurricane, tornado, or a bomb, the other data centers continue
> without much of an issue.

Netflix uses Amazon to host some of its services, but I believe they
don't use them exclusively. Ultimately that's what any business with
critical infrastructure in the cloud needs to do: use multiple vendors.
Common APIs, tools like Eucalyptus (http://www.eucalyptus.com/ mentioned
elsewhere in this thread), and projects like OpenStack
(http://openstack.org/) suggest this may be more practical in the future.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/