Amazon glitch raises concerns regarding 'the cloud'

“This is a wake-up call for cloud computing,” said Matthew Eastwood, an analyst for the innovation firm IDC, who used the term for accessing services and information in big data centers remotely over the Internet from anywhere, as if the services were in a cloud. “It will force a conversation in the industry.”

Side business five years ago

Amazon set up a side business five years ago, offering computing resources to businesses from its network of sophisticated data centers. Today, the company is the early leader in the fast-growing business of cloud computing.

In business, the cloud model is rapidly gaining popularity as a way for companies to outsource computing chores to avoid the costs and headaches of running their own data centers — simply tap in, over the Web, to computer processing and storage without owning the machines or operating software.

Amazon has thousands of corporate clients from Pfizer and Netflix to legions of start-ups, whose businesses often live on Amazon Web Services. Those reporting service troubles included foursquare, a location-based social networking site; Quora, a question-and-answer service; Reddit, a news-sharing site; and BigDoor, which makes game tools for Web publishers.

Big companies, analysts say, that have decided to put crucial operations on Amazon computers are apt to pay up for the equivalent of computing insurance. Netflix, the movie rental site, has become a large customer of the Amazon cloud. Most of its Web research — customer movie queues, search tools and the like — runs in Amazon data centers.

The long-term toll to cloud computing

The long-term toll to cloud computing, if any, is uncertain. Corporate cloud computing is expected to grow rapidly, by more than 25 percent a year, to $55.5 billion by 2014, IDC estimates.

Major research suppliers are aggressively promoting different cloud offerings — some emphasizing a utility-style service, like Amazon, and others focusing more on selling big companies the hardware and software to more efficiently juggle computing workloads. The latter use the cloud innovation, however in effect have their own private clouds.

The Amazon interruption

The Amazon interruption, said Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace, a specialist in data center services, was the computing equivalent of an airplane crash. It is a major episode with widespread damage. However cloud computing, like airline travel, he noted, is safer than traveling in a car — which compares with data centers run by individual companies.

“Every day, inside companies all over the world, there are research outages,” Moorman said. “Each episode is smaller, however they add up to far more lost time, money and business.”

Interest in Amazon handling this so then

“We all have an interest in Amazon handling this so then,” said Moorman, whose company is a competitor in the cloud business.