Google's GMail Outage: Another Blow for "The Cloud"

When will "Cloud Computing" be as reliable as your ATM?

In the last year, the idea of "cloud computing" -- the transition of desktop computing functions like email and word processing to external servers managed by tech giants -- has gained an enormous amount of traction. Today, most tech observers agree that in the future, much of our data will be stored in "the cloud," a vast network of inter-connected web-based servers far removed from individual users.

But several recent high-profile outages of popular web-based services, including Twitter, Amazon's (AMZN) S3 storage system, Apple's (AAPL) MobileMe web software suite, and now Google's (GOOG) Gmail, raise serious questions about the reliability of cloud computing. (After a 90-minute, apparently system-wide outage, Google said the problem was fixed.)

The GMail outage affected millions of users in the middle of Monday afternoon. Consumers and businesses weighing whether to use Google's online suite of tools, Google Docs, have taken notice. "Given the amount of my digital life that is stored at Google, it's a wake-up call," wrote Mashable.com blogger Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins.

As it is, "cloud computing" requires a leap of faith. Its proponents, which include Google, Microsoft (MSFT), and Apple, are basically asking users - and businesses - to entrust them with valuable data. But if these tech giants can't ensure the reliability of these services, why would anyone choose to use them?

Cloud computing proponents say they offer more space and better group productivity tools at a lower cost. Fair enough. If the service works.

In a way, these companies hope users will view their services the same way people commonly view banks: as a safe, reliable depository of valuable content that can be accessed at any time, through ATM machines.

But imagine if ATM machines failed the same way the services from Google, Apple, and Amazon have in recent weeks.

Venerable tech blogger Om Malik, who has been at the forefront of chronicling the recent troubles with web-based services, wrote that the Gmail outage brought his company to a halt.

"Given that our company relies on Google's Gmail and GTalk service, our operations came to a standstill this afternoon," Malik said. "If an outage of this magnitude can strike Google, the company with a fearsome infrastructure, I wonder who - if any - can plan for the worst.

To be fair, with the exception of Twitter, outages are pretty rare. I've used Gmail for years now, and Monday's disruption was the first time I've had to revert to my backup web-based email service, Yahoo (YHOO) Mail. (Memo to Jerry Yang: This is not a business strategy.) Today, some 20 million people trust Google to keep, protect, and make their emails available, which it has done largely without incident, until Monday.

Like other cloud computing advocates, Google says it can manage, protect, and make available your data better than you can. Based on recent history, I'm not convinced.

Comments

[bbzz24:]

And it is not only the god's servers that have to be constantly functioning: add reliable ISPs as well. One can always read his email and docs offline but in order to get access to the couds, internet (or ticket to paradise) is necessary as well. You gotta pay your dues to the church as well!

2008 Aug 13 04:09 AM

[sofaking30:]

Gmail is still in "beta" nuff said

2008 Aug 13 04:21 AM

[kdart:]

How does that outage compare to the outage you will suffer when your hard-disk crashes?

2008 Aug 13 08:10 AM

[LA Tech:]

Is there a "perfect" SaaS solution that will never crash, periodically? Probably not. Is there a non Macintosh computer system that will never make you reboot and sometimes rebuild a hard drive. Probably not.

Google's Postini SaaS email security solution is EXCELLENT in terms of it's proven track record of uptime, reliability, and being secure.

In the 5 years of my firm using Postini, we have never had an email service interruption from Postini.

Email is the most important business application for the internet. And Postini makes email flow day after day after day!

2008 Aug 13 08:41 AM

[luzmuller:]

I have had Office Live from Microsoft for now a year. I have my company's website and the associated email service on it. The email part has just disappeared a week ago and I do not have a clue whether there are any enquiries or orders for my service that remain unanswered. I have been talking to MS for a week now and all I hear is that "We do not know what happened but the matter has been escalated". I had no other alternative than to alert all my contacts - literally hundreds of them - that they should use my trusty Yahoo email serivice whilst this sad state of affairs persist. Just as well that Jerry Yang did not go with MS or his email service would probably also be screwed up by now.

2008 Aug 13 08:56 AM

[pansapien:]

There seems to be a lot of fear mongering going on around cloud computing. For some reason the complainers seem to want to imply that cloud computing was going to be flawless when all experience tells us we should expect occasional outages.

And since when is Twitter a cloud service?

2008 Aug 13 08:58 AM

[vassar:]

Google and MobileMe are more reliable than any server in our office.

2008 Aug 13 09:38 AM

[Larry Crow:]

kdart -- You should backup your hard-drive constantly. There's no excuse to ever lose more than a few hours's or single day's worth of work due to any crash. So, what if my hard-drive crashes? I pull my last backup off the tape or disk and thank myself for backing-up every day. Of course, restoring an OS may be harder than that, but, relatively speaking, not that hard.

2008 Aug 13 12:02 PM

[notsosmart:]

the weathermanhas the answer.hen you have clouds you could have a storm.

2008 Aug 13 12:06 PM

[matt earle:]

I think you are failing to put your expectation of reliability in context. Google's GMail is relatively much more reliable than any enterprise system that I have ever encountered. Just because they have a brief, fully recovered bit of downtime for a couple hours every six months does not mean that their product is not a superior alternative to the vast majority of in-house corporate systems. In fact, most corporate email systems have lots of downtime, occasionally fail so that data is lost and deliver a worse user experience the whole time.

The bigger problem with cloud computing is trusting these companies with your data, especially if the U.S. government is snooping around whenever they deem it necessary.

2008 Aug 13 02:02 PM