Jerry Hildenbrand is from the Android Central.
You've heard a lot about the cloud. We were told how great it was, how much better it would be, and how much more companies would be able to do when they went all-in with the cloud. What does it all mean, and how can everything break when just a tiny bit of it goes funky?
Even though many products and services depend on the cloud, the average consumer has no idea what it is or how it works. There is no shame in this. We don't know how many tech products work. We don't have to know anything to use the tech in our lives. When things go wrong, we only care about the cloud.
I'm not a network engineer who can keep a cloud up and running. I know that a cloud outage can ruin things. If you didn't know that, November and December of 2021, taught you everything you needed to know. We saw that Facebook or Meta was squirrely. We saw that the services we use were working. We couldn't access them because of "the cloud" and the fact that Amazon's Web Services went down twice in one week.
Downdetector.
Humans make errors every single day and the reasons why the cloud platforms crashed were typical. Humans will continue to make mistakes. It's hard to be upset at Amazon because your gadgets stopped working, or at Facebook because you couldn't read an email, because they're both examples of why it's hard to be angry. You can't blame the companies for the outages because they weren't the cause of the problems and they were fixed once found. This is the time when you should dislike the game and not the players.
The idea of "the cloud" is great, but the execution is broken. There is no finger-pointing because Microsoft, Google, and Facebook use their own cloud infrastructure to drive their services. They own it. They broke it. They have to fix it. Every other company is dependent on another company to power their business.
There are a lot of cloud service providers. The companies that control the internet are Amazon, Microsoft, and others. These companies offer giant cloud infrastructure to companies that don't want to build their own. These companies can take down the internet, including how smart gadgets work. This isn't likely to change soon.
Andrew Martonik is from the Android Central.
If you're a customer, building out your own internet-enabled infrastructure is not possible because of the costs. Take a smart camera. I would need to send you a message on your phone if I owned a company that made a great camera, because I would want it to be able to tell you whenever it sees something. I would need a website that could show you everything on both browsers, with a different rendering engine, and a robust app for both phones. I would like to provide online storage for my customers.
I could find the people to build the best home security system with a smart camera in the world, but I couldn't offer any connected features without using Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. A combination of the three. If I want to compete, I need to work with another company that runs "the cloud." My customers want these features, so if I want to compete, I need to work with another company that runs "the cloud." This is before I add compatibility with digital assistants. Unless I find a sugar daddy that will float me a billion dollars to build my own, I'm forced to use a cloud service provider. My cameras go down when there is a problem. No ifs, no ands, no buts.
Who are you to blame? This is a situation that benefits everyone. Companies that build a cloud-computing platform gain customers, while companies that offer services or products that need cloud infrastructure can get it at an acceptable price. We get the services and gadgets that we want to use. There is nothing wrong with this until something happens.
The photo was taken by Bermicourt.
My gut says that the companies that depend on the cloud should pay for multiple providers to make sure that things don't go down at the same time. My brain thinks that this would increase the cost of everything we use. Amazon could build redundant into everything. Someone could switch to the backup cloud if it broke. Guess what? To make up for the increased costs of using cloud services, we have to pay more for the services and gadgets we want to use.
I don't know how this can be fixed, and I'm not sure if it's a big deal that you can't see the latest post on your social media accounts. It's probably not, but cloud outages can affect smart door locks and critical infrastructure. It's worse if you have to fight through rush hour traffic with all the traffic lights useless, only to get home and be locked out of your house, than it is if you can't watch a show on Netflix.
I don't need to know how to fix it. Hopefully, the people who need to figure it out are working on it. The potential for things to be much worse is real, but so far the cloud outages have been an annoyance.
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