On April 21st, for the first time in my life, I sent out a newsletter (my very first one) through MadMimi (they’re very good btw).
And when I go to see if there are any orders, Fotomoto (which takes the orders and sends them to a printer) is down.
Down. Down. Down.
They were down at 3 a.m. and when I woke up the next morning they were still down. And they remained down throughout the day.
And do you know why? Because Amazon – the place where the most sophisticated servers are housed – and where Fotomoto recently moved so that they would be scalable – that part of Amazon is down. I can’t believe it. What about this whole cloud computing thing? Think of how many people are backing up their photos to the Amazon cloud. Think of how many businesses are reliant on them for offsite backups.
Down for about a day and a half. And not everything was recovered (according to my sources).
Like the banks, I thought that Amazon was too big to fail.
I guess not.
Of course I see that their storefront (Amazon.com) wasn’t effected.
A whole bunch of sites that rely on Amazon for robust hosting were effected, for example, HootSuite.
And today there was an announcement about a real netbook — the Samsung ChromeBook that really doesn’t have anything on it except a browser. Everything will be saved in the cloud. I think that’s sort of scary.
The first Chromebooks will usher in “a new era in computing,” according to Samsung, which said at the post-Google I/O event that it was “here not to actually launch a new product but to launch a new idea.”
First of all – not a new idea. It’s been around for over a decade and was first championed by Oracle. Second, it is a new implementation of an old idea. So far – it has never panned out for the simple reason that when people own software, they like to have it with them. Whether it’s an app that’s sitting in flash memory, or your resume that’s on a pc / mac and backed up to somewhere that you can get your hands on it. If your primary storage place is a commercial cloud, what happens if the cloud isn’t available for a while (it’s a sunny day). What happens when you want to switch to a new and better cloud? There really are a bunch of questions about the cloud. Or then again – maybe I’m just not as visionary as the folks at Samsung and Google.
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And after I wrote this – Google had major problems with Youtube and Blogger. So the too big to crash thing – I dunno.
Is that the reason the shopping cart buttons are missing from your site?
Yes. That’s the reason. Fotomoto is on the Amazon Cloud or whatever. Hootesuite and a bunch of other companies are down.
ah, glad to see the Amazon Cloud has floated back into view as of this morning!
Speaking of unexpected technological surprises. AOL for some insane reason switched the OK and Cancel buttons on their email. OK used to be on the left, where it should be, because we read left to right in our society and since OK is pressed far more often than Cancel, it should come first, which in a society that reads from left to right means on the left!!! But noooooo. AOL decided to switch the buttons around and put Cancel on the left. So all day long I have been canceling the sending of emails and other commands instead of okaying them. Maybe some ergonomics major is doing a study and AOL agreed to help him. Or maybe it has something to do with the Amazon cloud that rained on AOL email. I say WTF!!!!
Yeah, I have had some trepidation to this whole cloud thing taking off, and fearing everybody would go to it and abandon all other ways (HD and or SSD) on mobile smart gadgets, laptops, etc., to save on those components, to make their devices even thinner, smaller, lighter, or to tease with adding extra processing power in place of those storing drives. Or a slot to keep loose change in. A cup holder.
I am just not too keen on it. To me, it just doesn’t seem logical, who would want to relinquish all their data, files, images, etc., to some abstract, external entity, and just trust that they will take care of it all, and always be there.
Ye of little faith, moi.