Educating you on the benefits and "how to" of integrating cloud computing with your business network.

Amazon.com spent a couple days right before the Easter weekend trying to fix a cloud outage that has partially disabled or knocked out popular websites like Quora, Foursquare and Reddit.

Despite the fact that Amazon has a reputation as one of the top players in the cloud sector, the disruption will be hard for the company’s current customers to brush off — and the publicity surrounding the outage could make it difficult for Amazon to attract new customers, reports Computerworld.

“This will give the other cloud vendors, especially the higher-end ones, a talking point that won’t go away for years,” sais Ezra Gottheil, analyst at Technology Business Research.

But eWEEK.com asks (and answers): Is it too much of a snap reaction to ask if the outage will cause CIOs to hesistate about upgrading their IT systems with cloud-type deployments? Will IT execs question the cloud’s prime-time readiness for key business operations?

In a word: Nah.

There’s no question that the Amazon outage raises important points for enterprises to consider about which services to subscribe to from a public cloud, which should remain on the organization’s physical premises, or which to deploy as private cloud services. But those are questions that IT decision-makers grapple with every day.”

“The first thing to understand [about this event] is that this changes nothing,” Andi Mann, longtime storage industry analyst who’s currently serving as chief cloud strategy guru at CA Technologies, told eWEEK.

And Lydia Leong of Gartner Research wrote in an advisory that Amazon didn’t actually violate its service-level agreement when the outage occurred.

“Amazon’s SLA for EC2 is 99.95 percent for multi-AZ deployments,” Leong wrote. “That means that you should expect that you can have about 4.5 hours of total region downtime each year without Amazon violating its SLA.

“Note, by the way, that this outage does not actually violate their SLA. Their SLA defines unavailability as a lack of external connectivity to EC2 instances, coupled with the inability to provision working instances. In this case, EC2 was just fine by that definition. It was Elastic Block Store [EBS] and Relational Database Service [RDS] which weren’t, and neither of those services have SLAs.”

So, what are the takeaways from Amazon’s stormy cloud?  Perhaps first, that cloud computing isn’t a panacea for all that ails you and your computing needs.  That said, cloud computing still represents a major technology shift that has great positives for business and personal computing alike.

Second, stay realistic in estimating cloud computing’s value for you.  To that end, a wise sage once said, “follow the money.”  Looking at the structuring of your service provider’s SLA (whether cloud computing or other) will give you valuable insight to the limitations your service provider sees in the service offered.