Cloud 8 and a half

 

So there was an outage (kinda) of the AWS platform yesterday that effectively nobbled a load of business and social systems (like the Inland Revenue and Snapchat) that host their software on that platform. Apparently it was a DNS problem (isn't it always) and although most of the affected applications were ok and still running on the servers in Virginia however the rest of the internet couldn't find them as the traffic signposts (which is what DNS effectively is) disappeared for a time. It's probably going to take a while for things to get back to normal as DNS entries are cached (for performance) in all kinds of places including on your own laptop and usually aren't refreshed for a day or so.

I'm not a huge fan of such systems, or rather the way the market has evolved and how that market for hosting platforms has been more or less sewn up by three big US tech firms, Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (AZURE) and Google (GCP) Cloud platforms are very clever, hugely scalable but not particularly cheap and have some serious downsides IMO, the main ones being,

1. It takes a huge investment to move your business systems into one of these "clouds"
2. Once you're on a cloud platform it's devilishly difficult and expensive to move to another one
3. If the cloud you're in goes pop then you're more or less screwed
4. All the major cloud platforms belong to US companies and the US is proving to be more and more an unreliable trading partner.

I really wish Europe (or even the UK) had the wherewithal to create our own (large-scale) cloud platform provider, preferably more than one. This may seem idealistic as the Americans seem to have already won this battle but we do have some significant existing players in this field that could be encouraged ($$) to scale up, but it would require huge investment! 

I am increasingly nervous about the instability of the US (politically and socially) and these platforms are what I would call "critical infrastructure" at this point in time, on the current trajectory the scope for these private companies to be bullied into imposing sanctions (on undesirable competitors or regimes) under political pressure is already pretty big in my estimation and will only increase in the next couple of years, the risk that we will loose more than just our favourite social network for a couple of hours is something worth pondering!