Windows Azure — Microsoft’s cloud platform — went dark for nearly 24 hours last weekend. Let’s keep the darkness in perspective: Azure is not a production network yet; it’s merely a test cloud environment that Microsoft is still optimizing. But 22 hours of darkness doesn’t inspire peace of mind in cloud systems. And I’m starting to think that Amazon.com — backed by loads of open source applications — is the cloud to beat.
The Windows Azure team posted a blog describing what went wrong, what was affected, and how Microsoft plans to prevent similar outages. Rival clouds — from Google and Amazon — have also suffered outages, notes InformationWeek.
But the buzz around Amazon Web Services (including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon Simple Storage Services) seems to be growing louder. We’ve blogged quite a bit about solutions providers and software developers (such as Levementum, OpenBI and JumpBox) pushing open source applications into Amazon’s cloud.
We’ll discuss the IT channel’s march toward cloud services more extensively during The VAR Guy: Live webcast on April 15. (Details will surface soon on www.TheVARguy.com/events.)
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The link to Amazon S3 its wrong. The “S3″ in uppercase wont work. Needs to be lowercase (as in “s3″).
Regards
Mosso (Rackspace’s new cloud system) is in the ring as of this week as an option. They appear to offer an attractive cloud hosting plan. Will be neat to watch this dance unfold.
sean
Leonardo: All fixed. Sorry about that.
Sean: Great point regarding Rackspace’s Mosso. I need to give that a closer look for readers.
-jp
@Joe – let me know if I can help introduce you to Mosso.
Rob La Gesse
Director of Customer Development
Mosso | The Rackspace Cloud
Rob: It’s great to connect with you. Yes, we need to talk about Mosso without a doubt. joe [at] ninelivesmediainc.com. I have heavy travel next few days but will be on email regularly.