One of the fears which cloud computing – or any hosted application – brings out in museum and other IT professionals is that your up-time becomes reliant on services over which you have no control. I’ve always argued that although this is a real fear, it’s infinitely more likely that the ropy single machine you’ve got holding your museum website up is going to fall over than an application hosted with Amazon, Google or Yahoo on an enormous server farm.
For those who feel this may be a bit of a fatuous response, a recent post on the Amazon Web Service Blog may provide some more reassurance. They’ve announced that as of October 1st 2007, the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement is in effect. It guarantees 99.9% monthly uptime, with service credits being paid back against your account for any time below the three nines. It seems likely that EC3 will be next, but this is still a beta service so it’s hardly suprising that they’re not offering it right now…
So there you go. Another reason not to compute in the cloud disappears.