Over the past few weeks we’ve witnessed a couple of big outages in the cloud computer world. First there was the downtime on Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure , and then this week there was the Blogger outage on Google’s infrastructure. These high profile outages, coupled with the slightly different but orders of magnitude more damaging Playstation Network outage have gotten some people questioning the wisdom of building or moving services into the cloud, including the New York Times .

I’m still incredibly bullish on cloud-hosted services and the power and potential of the cloud. There are two fundamental reasons why. First, the cloud is The Great Leveler. Not since the advent of the personal computer has the playing field been leveled so significantly. If you come up with the idea for the next Facebook or Google you can bootstrap it for a tiny fraction of what buying the required hardware would have cost you. As your service grows, you can scale. You can compete with anybody in the world for handling user traffic on day 1.

The second reason is that while I discovered that AWS Availability Zones aren’t quite as separated as I thought (EBS control plane is shared per-region, but distributed across AZs in the region) there were many websites who survived the outage came to little or no harm (namely Twilio, Netflix.) The outage at EC2 makes the case for cloud computing, it doesn’t damn. High Availability 101 says that you can’t have a single point of failure. The services that went down were primarily in a single Availability Zone on AWS. If you have everything running in a single AZ then you are asking for trouble. You have to assume failure. Netflix takes this to the extreme with their Chaos Monkey .

Furthermore, the cloud is still evolving. One thing that I think that we will see developing as an extension of some current endeavors, and as a result of these recent outages, is the “meta-cloud” provider. Companies like RightScale are already playing in this space. I think that they should start building technology to abstract away the cloud provider entirely and create a market for compute resources. They can run your service on EC2 if thats where they are getting the best combination of cost and performance (think: spot instances) or they could bring it up on RackSpace’s cloud if the best price and performance is there. They could utilize many providers to get better performance (routing users to datacenters closest to them.) They could also bring your service up in multiple cloud providers to add an even higher level of availability and redundancy, or switch your provider if an anomaly or outage is detected where you are currently hosted.