[1] There’s recently been substantial focus on the doom and gloom of recent “cloud computing” issues. There’s no specific blog postings I’ll link to in this case. Rather, one just has to search on any of:

• Apple’s MobileMe woes
• Google’s repeated GMail outages
• Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) downtimes

It’s not a giant leap in understanding as to why people are so upset about losing their services. cloud computing offers a very significant opportunity for users, and more so businesses, to migrate data and services to a centralised entity. For the user, it’s internet hosting on steroids; not only my website and email, but my picture, music, my applications, and my user profile can be stored at a trusted host, and managed by the user. The rise of the netbook, and the fall of home managed backup solutions.Businesses have even more to gain. As Larry Dignan [2] points out, the benefits to an enterprise  (reduction of costs related to staff, in-house technologies, and the omnipresent Green costs) are substantial.But as Mr. Dignan points out, the availability is not quite there yet; which is why people are crying in the streets and ready to march on the head-quarters of their selected cloud provider with lit torches and pitchforks.Honestly though, is this really a surprise to anyone? Hosted technologies have been around a long time. Every time I pick up my home telephone, I’m using a hosted technology. How long did it take AT&T, or Bell Canada to master the so called five-nines of availability?The new way of cloud providers and the SaaS offerings delivered via those clouds are bound for something near the stratospheric promises being thrown about. It will take time to achieve though. In the interim, early adopters who are paying for the services, and relying solely upon those services as their primary data storage mechanism, or primary customer interaction mechanism, or primary intra-business communications mechanism, or … (surely you get my point) … are setting themselves up for pain.It has been said in other blogs before, but the user must be prepared to either accept the Service Level Agreement provided, or they must prepare for the inevitable failure of the service they’ve purchased. The SLAs from these vendors makes this inevitability clear. Amazon is a great example of a company that will refund you a portion of your billed service when they fail to meet their targets. They know it’s going to happen, and they’ve let you know.Going back to Mr. Dignan’s article, users and businesses should be prepared for the inevitable. Data should be kept in a secure, private storage if one is afraid it may be compromised. Data should be stored redundantly in case of prolonged unavailabiliy or worse, loss of an online storage service. Compute resources should be allocated in a manner that considers a failure of the cloud environment (for example, via multiple cloud providers, or via making the cloud the distributed resource behind a “local” resource).All that being said, this is not a reason to abandon cloud computing. These progressive companies offering cloud infrastructure, and these early adopters are providing the learnings which will ultimately make the cloud and the SaaS offerings sufficiently reliable. New technologies and manners of use will always have such pain points… I would wager that AT&T wouldn’t be failure-proof with their cloud offering either, and the have the benefit of all those telecom lessons learned already.Yell at the cloud if you must… But it won’t hurry along the process.