I've been so heads down this week on our burgeoning Enterprise 2.0 Market IQ research, companion webinar, and 4-days of training (premiering first week of March in Boston - hint hint - join us in the fun!), that I missed the early morning dark cloud that broke over Amazon's S3 web service today.
I'm fairly bullish on SaaS (software-as-a-service), and related topics of Utility, Grid or "Cloud" Computing, (which I successfully infected as a meme about 6 years ago, while I was at Delphi Group, in the form of a whitepaper, and extension of our long running Portal seminars and conferences). This stuff isn't new folks! Just new enough that most people still don't understand the pros and cons... including Amazon, who, even though being known largely as selling everything except houses, cars, and human organs, has been heavily moving down the SaaS road for a while now.
In any case, turns out that the uptime/resiliency of Amazon's S3 offering suffered a bit of a meltdown today, taking out broad swaths of Web 2.0 startups who have effectively outsourced major parts of their infrastructure to Amazon's cloud services. What Web 2.0 Services? Folks like twitter (already stumbling from the outages suffered during the SuperBowl [which I also didn't notice, having givien up hope for professional sports after the late 80s run of the Steelers, Pirates and Penguins]), 37Signals (makers of Basecamp, among others), AdaptiveBlue, Slideshare.net, and many others.
There has been a whirlwind of commentary on the web today, I'll just point out a highlight that I stumbled across, and blog by John Willis that I plan to keep an eye on - the title of the post being "Look Mom, Two Nines - Amazon S3 Major Outage Today." Great summary there, and links to his highlights of others commentary.
Further to that, a very nice extra swath of thoughts on cloud computing et al on the same blog, "Demystifying Clouds."
Do the troubles with Amazon today signal the end of this movement? Not a chance, but the reason I tagged this post as "Risk Management" as well as SaaS is that, as the Boy Scouts say "Be Prepared!" Outsourcing capabilities doesn't mean that you shouldn't still own responsibility to keep your boat afloat.
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