The idea of the cloud makes us feel a lot safer. If something happens to our hard drive, our network, our servers, the information is all still there. But, the recent outage at Amazon Web Services reminded cloud users that they’re still dependent on a physical server. The idea of an invincible, invisible cloud simply isn’t accurate.
That cloud still exists in the physical world somewhere. And when that place goes down, Amazon Cloud users, including Quora, Foursquare and more, went down with it.
Many of these users had no back-up plan. Because, frankly, the Amazon Cloud was their back-up plan, that they simply started using as their primary servers. Amazon has already started talking about how they are working to ensure this type of outage doesn’t happen again. But many, and rightly so, are going to slow down their faith in this invisible digital savior that is “cloud computing.”