Written By Mark Hinkle 
 
 To the tune of American Pie, with apologies to Don McLean… 
 
 I can still remember 
 
 How that cloud used to make me smile. 
 
 And I knew if I had my chance 
 
 That I could make those people dance 
 
 And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while. 
 
 But April 21st made me shiver 
 
 With every Tweet the Clouderati did deliver. 
 
 Bad news on the doorstep; 
 
 I couldn’t take one more step. 
 
 I can’t remember if I cried 
 
 When I read about when the data center died, 
 
 But something touched me deep inside 
 
 The day the cloud died. 
 
 After all the ballyhoo about cloud computing delivered by Amazon (New York Times, Netflix and countless others) it sent ripples through the tech community to see favorite tech sites Reddit, Quora, and FourSquare offline on Thursday, due to an outage for the Amazon EC2 service at the company’s Northern Virginia data center. It’s doubtful that Amazon Web Services CTO Werner Vogels was pleased to see his IT prognosis, “everything fails all the time. We lose whole datacenters!” proven right. 
 
 You might think the private cloud computing community would get a little bit of satisfaction out of seeing the Amazon outage, and admittedly, it’s not the worst thing that happened for those of us that develop cloud computing software. However, we believe that the success of the public cloud will help will drive private cloud adoption. Though the outage probably did little to help the cloud computing industry as a whole, it’s our sincere hope that it in the long term it illustrates the need for proper planning and design, not a condemnation of cloud computing in general. 
 
 The problem that was brought to light by the Amazon outages wasn’t that public clouds are unreliable, but rather that cloud computing isn’t a proxy for good architecture and planning. One factor needed for good design is an understanding of how that cloud is implemented, so you can address failures in your cloud strategy. Having some control of your infrastructure and design can help insure you understand your cloud architecture completely. 
 
 George Reese from enStratus astutely points out in this tweet that there are four levels of cloud redundancy: virtual resource, availability zone, region, and cloud. If your cloud fails it’s not solely the fault of your cloud provider or software. 
 
 Scott Sanchez also notes in his CloudNod blog that some cloud users were affected because they chose not to utilize the resources needed for managing a cloud for high availability: 
 
 As I blogged yesterday, many of the higher profile sites that were down yesterday simply chose to ignore the options available to them today and instead chose to point the finger at Amazon instead of looking in the mirror. Lots of reasons why they prefer finger to mirror… cost, time, skill, or all of the above. 
 
 BigDoor CEO, Keith Smith voiced his criticism for Amazon and faulted them for a lack of transparency. 
 
 We’ve managed to find workarounds to the technical challenges. But it was disconcerting to us that Amazon’s otherwise stellar system was being marred. Not so much by a temporary technical issue, rather by what seemed like an unwillingness to embrace transparency. 
 
 That’s brings me to the second takeaway from the Amazon outage: it’s not just about better planning and architecture but about transparency in the services in software you use to manage the cloud. 
 
 As you start planning for your cloud computing infrastructure it is important that you consider not only public cloud providers but also cloud computing infrastructure built on transparently developed open source software that you implement with the best practices. 
 
 Mark Hinkle is VP of Community for Cloud.com, a provider of cloud software for the data center. ||||| In business, the cloud model is rapidly gaining popularity as a way for companies to outsource computing chores to avoid the costs and headaches of running their own data centers — simply tap in, over the Web, to computer processing and storage without owning the machines or operating software. 
 
 Amazon has thousands of corporate customers, from Pfizer and Netflix to legions of start-ups, whose businesses often live on Amazon Web Services. Those reporting service troubles included Foursquare, a location-based social networking site; Quora, a question-and-answer service; Reddit, a news-sharing site; and BigDoor, which makes game tools for Web publishers. 
 
 The problems companies reported varied, but included being unable to access data, service interruptions and sites being shut down. 
 
 Photo 
 
 Amazon has data centers around the world, but the current problems have come from its big center in Northern Virginia, near Dulles airport. Amazon’s Web page on the status of its cloud services said on Friday that matters were improving but were still not resolved. A company spokeswoman said the updates would be Amazon’s only comment for now. 
 
 Big companies, that have decided to put crucial operations on Amazon computers are apt to pay up for the equivalent of computing insurance, analysts say. Netflix, the movie rental site, has become a large customer of the Amazon cloud. Most of its Web technology — customer movie queues, search tools and the like — runs in Amazon data centers. 
 
 Netflix said it had sailed through the last couple of days unscathed. “That’s because Netflix has taken full advantage of Amazon Web Services’ redundant cloud architecture,” which insures against technical malfunctions in any one location, said Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman. 
 
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 BigDoor, a 20-employee start-up in Seattle, was knocked down by Amazon’s travails. It had backup and recovery services with Amazon, said Keith Smith, the chief executive, but only at Amazon’s data center in Virginia. “There’s always a trade-off,” Mr. Smith said, noting the expenses and developer time that would have been required to do more. 
 
 By Friday evening, most services at BigDoor, which makes game and rewards features for online publishers, were back up, but its Web site was still down. 
 
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 The long-term toll to cloud computing, if any, is uncertain. Corporate cloud computing is expected to grow rapidly, by more than 25 percent a year, to $55.5 billion by 2014, IDC estimates. 
 
 Major technology suppliers are aggressively promoting different cloud offerings — some emphasizing a utility-style service, like Amazon, and others focusing more on selling big companies the hardware and software to more efficiently juggle computing workloads. The latter use the cloud technology, but companies own and control them — so-called private clouds. 
 
 The Amazon interruption, said Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace, a specialist in data center services, was the computing equivalent of an airplane crash. It is a major episode with widespread damage. But airline travel, he noted, is still safer than traveling in a car — analogous to cloud computing being safer than data centers run by individual companies. 
 
 “Every day, inside companies all over the world, there are technology outages,” Mr. Moorman said. “Each episode is smaller, but they add up to far more lost time, money and business.” 
 
 The Amazon setback, he said, should prove to be a learning experience. “We all have an interest in Amazon handling this well,” said Mr. Moorman, whose company is a competitor in the cloud business.
– Amazon still hasn't fully resolved the massive computer glitch that has brought down or slowed websites large and small, but one thing is clear: “This is a wake-up call for cloud computing,” an industry analyst tells the New York Times. “It will force a conversation in the industry.” With cloud computing, companies pay to use the huge computer servers of others, and Amazon has emerged as a leader in a field expected to grow to $55.5 billion by 2014. But this week's problems at Amazon's northern Virginia data center highlight the risks. Specifically, companies will need to more carefully assess which information goes to the clouds and which stays in the home office. They also may need to pony up more money for what amounts to cloud insurance by having data spread out over different sites. In a Forbes blog post headlined "The Day the Cloud Died," Eric Savitz hopes Amazon's mess "illustrates the need for proper planning and design, not a condemnation of cloud computing in general."