The protagonist played by Tom Hanks in Cast Away is how many users must have felt like,
abandoned alone on an island, when both Google and Facebook went offline, almost in cascade on
the 1th and 11th of !ecember" #ven though the outage lasted only for twenty minutes in case of
Google, and few hours for Facebook, panic and fren$y started showing up on the tweeting giant
Twitter, with %googledown as a trending topic within minutes after the outage" These outages
weren&t part of any orchestrated &anonymous& attacks, or as few witty tweeters put it ' symptoms of
the apocalypse , or the &world going down& action due this !ecember"
Google had an outage with some of its widely used non(search applications like mail, chat and other
Cloud based services went offline, followed by Facebook going down for few hours" )eparate
infrastructural glitches caused these outages ' a buggy software update in case of Google, and web
address translation problem associated with the !*) for Facebook"
These glitches although weren&t catastrophic in terms of loss of data, or did not entirely cripple lives
of people, they must serve as another warning against the piously propagated unfettered Cloud
computing endorsement"
The hardware hurdle
Clarifying the outage, Google promptly confided the cause and actions that were taken in a report
published on the Google Apps dash board" A bug in a load balancing software update caused the
temporary outage of Google services"
+hen more than one server is catering to user re,uests, which is certainly the case when Google is
serving content via thousands of servers from hundreds of locations, there is a necessity to balance
the load -user re,uests. on each of the servers" To leave one server bombarded with re,uests, while
other servers are la$ing out would deem to poor network design" The arbitration mechanism used to
balance the load between servers and server farms using intelligent programs running on powerful
switching computers is /server load balancing0"
To accommodate for the infrastructural modifications, running software updates on a regular basis
is imperative" 1t was during one such procedure of updating the server load balancing software, a
bug in the software as analysed by Google engineers had caused the 12 minutes service outage on
certain Google applications" This glitch had affected Google 3ail, Chat, Google !rive and Chrome
browsers, while Google search engines had remained immune to this problem"
Facebook, had a more routine problem faced by websites, pertaining to a web address translation
mechanism, or the !omain *ame )ystem -!*)." This telephone directory look(up e,uivalent for
translating te4tual web address to numeric server addresses -15 address. is the first, and most
important step to allow clients to reach the servers" +hen this look up fails, the website remains
inaccessible" !*) server reconfiguration seemed to have affected Facebook on the desktop version,
while the there were no problems reported for the mobile version"
These infrastructural inconsistencies will add to the woes of users when all their work would
happen over the Cloud" Although Google and Facebook, or any other Cloud provider would claim
their infrastructure has multiple levels of redundancies built in, and they do in most cases, the risk
of losing millions of users& data is still higher than when a single user&s computer might fail"
Google services going offline, or Facebook going down for few hours do not imply technical
incompetencies on their part, but clearly sign an alarm at the reliability of Cloud based services
when adopted in full scale"
More trouble - security and privacy
6eliability is an additional concern to widespread implementation of the Cloud, apart from the
already debated issues like security and privacy" The world hasn&t reached a stage where Cloud
computing has become inevitable, contrary to the claims of Cloud service providers"
6egular incidents of user accounts being wiped off, or hi7acked due to weaknesses in the
authentication mechanisms of ma7or Cloud service providers are certainly discouraging for users to
migrate to the Cloud" Another aspect to the security threats faced in Cloud based services is that
there is no emphasis on the need to maintain stringent practices by users for the Cloud by itslef is
certainly not foolproof"
8efore the Cloud phenomenon, in case unauthorised access had been gained into one of the web
accounts of users, chances that it could lead into other accounts of the user, and access to their local
drives was almost impossible" *ow, with the Cloud built around the idea of &taking your data
wherever you go&, in case access to one of the accounts is gained ' either on user&s mobile or tablet,
it is in dominoes fashion, sufficient to collapsing other accounts and even reach the data on local
drives"
8y agreement users are continuously tracked, and logs maintained by the Cloud service providers"
5rivacy, simply is void with Cloud"
Cloud computing is in its nascent stages ' it must evolve into a reliable infrastructure with
impeccable security and respect to user privacy" Continuing in today&s trend, it will be an ecosystem
where users are left feeling dis(empowered, as #ben 3oglen from the )oftware Freedom 9aw
Center calls it in his /Freedom in the Cloud0 talk: then ride on the Cloud will not be frictionless"