Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Cloud Computing

You may have noticed that Gmail was very sporadic today. Imagine if your spreadsheets for that important business meeting were locked away up in that cloud?
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4 comments:

NoVa Sideliner said...

I kept getting a server error,and yes, I also thought about that cloud computing thing. Lovely! A friend of mine is all hot for cloud computing, so I'll have to make a note of this to him.

I do IT for a living, and I've suffered too many cases where one link in the chain fails, and everyone is hosed. If I have presentations to give, they are safely on the hard drive of my own laptop, as well as a backup copy on a pen drive that I can run off of someone else's PC if needed. No cloud for me thanks, except for uncritical data.

September 1, 2009 8:24 PM
Saqib Ali said...

ok let us be fair to google.

Firstly, What was unavailable was only Gmail's web interface - Email Servers were functioning with IMAP/POP access. Secondly docs.google.com and spreadsheets.google.com were available.

Backing up your documents is a good idea – cloud or no cloud. Let’s say Google can guarantee 100% uptime, what happens if your connections to internet goes down? So having a local copy is a good idea, regardless.

There are firefox scripts[1] that allow you to d/l all docs from a your Google Docs account, alternatively you can use cURL[2] to interact with Google APIs to d/l all documents.

1. http://blog.bradgrier.com/2009/05/22/back-up-google-docs-in-firefox/
2. http://kawphi.blogspot.com/2009/07/using-curl-to-download-google.html

September 2, 2009 12:59 AM
Anonymous said...

I have experienced this recently at work. Last year we migrated our in house data processing system to a data center in another state. It seemed to make sense at the time let them worry about maintenance, and no more taking backups offsite every night. We connect to the system thru a vpn tunnel. It works like a charm 99% of the time, but when the isp decides to hiccup, either here or on the data center side, or the networking hardware cooks itself, it brings everything to a stop. I think its the same with the cloud computing, its a beautiful thing when it works, which to be fair is 99% percent of the time. I remember when I took one of my first computer science courses, and the prof told us that "one day they'll get these computers to run as reliable as my honda, then they wont need all of us." Of course the 1% of the time when it fails is always at a critical moment.

September 2, 2009 1:50 AM
FutureShock said...

Up in a cloud of smoke maybe. No thanks. I will keep all my docs within arms reach.

September 4, 2009 12:30 PM

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