Cloud proof of failure - was:: wikileaks unreachable

Mon Dec 6 14:16:24 UTC 2010

On Dec 6, 2010, at 4:49 AM, Nathan Eisenberg wrote:

>> The cloud is a failure. Too easy to get it down.
>> I guess wikileaks returning to dedicated hosting proofs that.
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> No, it just proves that organizational decisions are made by human beings that have values.  Whether or not those values are 'right' isn't the point - the point is that the technology isn't what failed here.
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> There are plenty of dedicated server hosts that would have shut off wikileaks under political pressure - and there are plenty of 'cloud' hosts who would have kept them up.  I don't think we can draw any pass/fail conclusions WRT cloud computing (defined here as virtualization-as-a-service) from the removal of Wikileaks from S3.

I do, but not because of Amazon specifically. (As far as I know, Amazon's decision depended not at all on where its servers were located or that they were decentralized.)

In a cloud hosting environment, you typically don't know where your data and servers are, and thus you don't know what legal and political pressures they may be subject to. If that means that in practice you are subject to the combination of any pressure that can be applied to any one of the hosting centers maintained by your hosting provider, then "the cloud" indeed would seem pretty unattractive to anyone with politically or socially controversial content.

Regards
Marshall

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> Nathan
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