Cloud Grows, Amazon Hiccups

The global market for “cloud computing” is going to increase from about $41 billion in 2011 to $241 billion in 2020, according to new estimates from research firm Forrester. But on April 21, 2011, Amazon had significant outages for customers of its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud on the U.S. East Coast.

The computing center hosted in northern Virginia, which handles operations for the U.S. East Coast, was afflicted. Websites such as Foursquare, Quora and Reddit have cited service problems. Both Reddit, a user-generated news site, and Quora, a question-and-answer service, had error messages on their sites saying their were experiencing outages.

The outage will not likely have any longer-term impact on cloud computing. Most of us encounter service disruptions from time to time for any of our cloud-based services and applications. More significantly, many of us experience "outages" that have no adverse impact, because we were not trying to use a particular application at a particular time, in a particular region.

These days, browsers, operating systems, local and remote applications can crash. It's just a fact of life.

More Predictions on the Huge Growth of ‘Cloud Computing’ - Digits - WSJ (subscription required)