"Designing for Failure"

The recent outages for some Amazon Web Services customers illustrates the "design for failure" model of cloud computing, some argue. Under the "design for failure" model, combinations of software and management tools take responsibility for application availability. The actual infrastructure availability is entirely irrelevant to your application availability and 100-percent uptime should be achievable even when a cloud provider has a massive, data-center-wide outage.

Most cloud providers follow some variant of the "design for failure" model. A handful of providers, however, follow the traditional model in which the underlying infrastructure takes ultimate responsibility for availability. It doesn't matter how dumb your application is, the infrastructure will provide the redundancy necessary to keep it running in the face of failure. The clouds that tend to follow this model are vCloud-based clouds that leverage the capabilities of VMware to provide this level of infrastructural support.

The downside of the "design for failure" model is that you must "design for failure" up front.

The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment