cloud computing – ./jack.sh

gfail

The world is abuzz with talk of the next big thing in computing, the cloud. Well this week my experiences have told me one thing, the cloud sucks, it is the biggest pile of BS since the bailout of the banks.

First, Google Mail (gmail for the US) failed. Leaving customers both on hosted and the standard accounts, then my favourite hosting provider of nearly 5 years fails on me, there (gs) or GridService. The cloud based shared hosting system, which I decided to put some of my clients on to allow rapid scaling or as it has turned out rapid failing.

fail

The storage cluster of which my server is a part has failed, in a whale like fashion – Spewing its entrails all over the server. Thankfully my managerie of dedicated servers are still up and running, but I hadn’t transferred the remainder of the sites out of the (gs). Meaning the biggest of all my sites is no down for the count, and has been down for over 24hrs.

I love (mt) mediatemple, and there support staff are not doubt taking flak from every corner. But, I would really appreciate it if I could edit my DNS entries so I can get something up to explain to customers what the hell is going on, and no we haven’t gone bankrupt.

I would like to add, that I still would recommend mediatemple to anyone, but just not the (gs). If you want cloud Amazon EC2 or mediatemple (cs) when its out is what you want.

MediaTemple Cluster2 Status

TechCruch GFail

Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about – available wherever you happen to be. www.mesh.com

Microsoft being its usual self has joined the web 2.0 party, and looks as if the Yahoo! bid was a hint at a much larger plan.

So what exactly is the significance of Mesh and the whole Microsoft online play? Its validated a couple of ideas cloud computing is definitely going to have a massive impact the way in which we interact with both mobile devices and laptops/desktops, and also Microsoft has seen a little sense and is bending to the will of user.

Office Online?

An obvious application that Microsoft will put into mesh is Office, quite frankly the current online offering is underwhelming and Google Docs beats it, but in mesh with a cross-platform version of office that follows you I would be willing to pay for that.

Did I here you say Cross-Platform?

Along with the announcement of Mesh some other intersting things came out of the tour, support for Macs! Is this a much bigger plan to get out of the Operating System business or transition to providing a thinned out operating system that can access mesh (They may even use an Open Source kernel)

I think Microsoft has got themselves some new friends and I will be sure to check out Mesh in more detail very soon. Its going to interesting if they do it right…