Blame game over Amazon outage misses the point

As in previous outages of megascale cloud implementations from likes of Amazon and Microsoft, this incident triggered a round of hysteria about the future of cloud computing. Surprisingly, unlike the response to last April's AWS outage, many rushed to Amazon's defense. This could be a reflection of the fact that attitudes toward the cloud and its inevitable failings are becoming more realistic, or it could simply be that this month's outage was far less widespread. In either case, anti-public-cloud pundits and competitors alike wasted no time in using this failure to underline why the public cloud is an incredibly bad idea.

As I've said previously, I am on the whole relatively shocked by the wild reactions that always seem to follow these highly publicized events. One blog entry written by private cloud vendor Piston Computing particularly caught my eye. In it, Piston co-founder Gretchen Curtis opined that this most recent AWS outage was proof it's better to own than to rent. Even though buying may come to think of it be better than renting in many cases, I lament the black-and-white nature of this post, and think it's a great example of the FUD from self-interested entities that always seems to trail similar events and eventually serves no one so then.