Crash! Down goes Google Calendar — cloud services are not perfect

Cloud services crash. Of course, non-cloud-services crash too — a server in your data center can go down, too. At least there you can do something, or if it’s a critical system you can plan with redundancies and failover.

Not so much with cloud services, as this morning’s failure of Google Calendar clearly shows. The photo shows Google’s status dashboard as of 6:53am on Thursday, June 30.

I wrote about crashes at Amazon Web Services and Apple’s MobileMe back in 2008 in “When the cloud was good, it was very good. But when it was bad it was rotten.”

More recently, in 2011, I covered another AWS failure in “Skynet didn’t take down Amazon Web Services.”

Overall, cloud services are quite reliable. But they are not perfect, and it’s a mistake to think that just because they are offered by huge corporations, they will be error-free and offer 100% uptime. Be sure to work that into your plans, especially if you and your employees rely upon public cloud services to get your job done, or if your customers interact with you through cloud services.