Cloud storage unreliable?
There is some press about a outage of Amazon's S3 cloud storage service. ars technica raises the point:
Fundamentally, cloud storage that centralizes functionality can also centralize failures in functionality, making cloud services vulnerable to widespread outages.
But centralization and failure are not unique to cloud storage. CDNs, colo facilities, and hosting providers, all can be single points of failure. I can recall a outage at 365 main in SF that bought down most of the "web 2.0". Economies of scale dictate that we will have large central resources. It is up to good application designers to build with the expectation that services will fail.
