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Showing posts from May, 2011

The Chernobyl accident of Cloud Computing

    When introducing Cloud Computing (CC) people usually like to emphasize the similarities between Electric Power Grids (EPG) and CC.     These analogies include: On demand service, Pay-Per-Use (PPU) model, the Elasticity of the resources, load balancing and even water cooling,     After the Amazon EC2 service disruption on April 21 st , 2011, we can identify more similarities between EPG and CC in disasters related issues. These similarities include: 1. A global damage (with immediate and delayed components). 2. Uncontrolled behavior of the resources (neutron population vs. loss of connectivity or fuel rods meltdown vs. failing servers). 3. During the crisis, similar announcements to the public which minimize the catastrophe. 4. After the crisis, publication of the event investigation in length. 5. Loss of confidence in the technology by the users.