Cloud computing is the idea of using federations of commodity machines (virtual or otherwise) that exist somewhere "in the clouds" (i.e., outside your own data center) and are physically hosted for you by a cloud computing service provider (such as Amazon.) Many of us see cloud computing as an important evolutionary step in computing technology. However, its also easy to find technology pundits, like Paul Murphy of ZDNet, who think cloud computing is doomed to failure. In his recent article, Where there's hype, there's fire?, Paul writes: "Cloud computing is strategically important to companies from Amazon to Google and even Microsoft is looking at it as a simplification technology for home computing. History shows us, however, that any success it has in the near term will be relatively shortlived."
Why? Because of reliability concerns. Citing examples such as a recent Gmail outage, Paul goes on to say that cloud computing is "dangerous stuff" because it it means putting all your "eggs in one basket - because there’s no comeback when things go wrong." Well, I suppose that if you indeed put all your eggs in one basket, you would have reliability risks. But why does using cloud computing require that you discard everything you know about building reliable systems? Why not build systems based on multiple cloud computing service providers with redundancy and fail-over designed into the architecture? Already we see companies like Amazon offering multiple cloud computing "zones", that is, physically isolated computing resources. By placing cloud computing servers in multiple distinct zone, you can reduce the risk of a total outage. Mixing cloud resources from multiple providers (and perhaps even from your own data center(s)) would further reduce such risks. Using cloud computing does not mean neglecting to architect solutions that meet their business requirements, including reliability requirements. But it does provide us with the ability to rapidly expand or contract our computing environments to meet changing demands on a pay-as-you-go, commodity style basis. In my opinion, cloud computing is a tremendous enabling technology breakthrough. | 
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