The reputation of cloud computing took another hit late last week when several high-profile customers of Amazon's web hosting services were knocked offline. Amazon said that it had server problems in one of its data centers, leaving some customers with non-operating websites, reported Sharon Gaudin at Computerworld.

Even though this type of outage is bound to occur from time to time, it casts a pall over the cloud business in general because Amazon is one of its foremost players, analysts said. "Amazon is held as a paradigm of operational uptime," said Robert Mahowald, an analyst at IDC. "When this kind of thing happens, it definitely sends a chill through the whole cloud and hosted services industry."

For businesses wary of moving services to the cloud, this outage will likely reinforce their fears.

"What will take a hit is the image of this technology as being one you can depend on, and that image was critically damaged today," said Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Enderle Group. "This provides a massive showcase of the risk associated with these kinds of services, which are sold like utilities but don't yet have the reliability we expect of most utilities. The impression being set today, if the outage continues, may take five to 10 years to fully recover from."

Amazon's handling of the disruption vis-à-vis customers also sparked criticism. One of companies disrupted by the outage was BigDoor, a start-up that "builds game mechanics into online publishers' websites." The company's CEO, Keith Smith, complained in a blog post that Amazon seemed legalistic and less-than-transparent in its communications regarding the outage, which proved to be more frustrating than the outage itself.

"As problems continued throughout the day, we experienced the obvious frustration from the system failure. But Amazon's communication failure was even more alarming," Smith wrote in a post at GeekWire. "Amazon's updates read as if they were written by their attorneys and accountants who were hedging against their stated SLA rather than being written by a tech guy trying to help another tech guy."

For more:
- see Sharon Gaudin's article at Computerworld
- see Keith Smith's post at GeekWire

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