The cloud, though economic, is not reliable. This is what comes to the fore when we consider the outages that have occurred in the last couple of months. On last Wednesday, Google Docs was not available for an hour, while the day after, on Thursday, Microsoft’s Hotmail, Office 365 and SkyDrive were offline for around 3 hours, inconveniencing millions of customers who rely on the services.
Search engine leader Google attributed the temporary failure to a ‘memory management bug.’ Alan warrant, Google’s engineering director explained, “Every time a Google Doc is modified, a machine looks up the servers that need to be updated. Due to the memory management bug, the lookup machine didn’t recycle their memory properly after each lookup, causing them to eventually run out of memory and restart. While they restarted their load was picked up by the remaining lookup machines, making them run out of memory even faster.”
IT giant Microsoft, on the the other hand blamed the failure on a DNS issue. The company said that it became aware of a Domain Name Service (DNS) issue causing service degradation for multiple services at approximately 8 pm PDT (3 am GMT). Services were restored at around 11.30 pm PDT (6.30 am GMT).
Businesses in Europe which use Microsoft’s Office 365 were unaffected as the outage happened during midnight when most businesses were closed. However, users in Asia Pacific region and North America bore the brunt of the technical failure since it occurred in the middle of office time for them.
The Redmond-based company issued a statement saying, “We are working on propagating the DNS configuration changes and so it will take some time to restore service to everyone.” Basically, the DNS is responsible for translating URL Web addresses from a series of numbers otherwise known as IP addresses.
Microsoft says it has a financial backed service-level agreement for its cloud services and last month gave BPOS customers a 24 per cent credit note on any future invoices following an outage.
All of this has raised questions about the reliability of cloud computing and its viability to replace local sources and applications. Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 was launched in June and within two months of its launch, the service went offline for a few hours, in August.
Jeff Mann, VP of research at analyst group Gartner reacted to the outage, “Windows and Office are the two foundations of Microsoft’s profitability and this is kind of messing with one of them.”
The cloud-based services are free, yet if businesses which depend on Gmail or Office 365 find that the outages are causing losses, they will have to consider whether savings from using the cloud are not being offset by the outages. Moreover, it would be prudent to have an alternate plan in case of any further outages.