Does Cloud Computing Have a Silver Lining?

Google Operations SVP Urs Hoelzle put up a less-than-informative blog post to explain "brown-outs" which left 14% of Google users with no or spotty access to their services. Apparently a flaw in Google's internal traffic routing, during a planned maintenance activity, saturated a network link, resulting in a DoS condition.

The post contains no word on how much Google Ads revenue was lost and no word on the security aspects, if any (it would be interesting to find out if any black-hats were quick enough on their toes to try and start advertising fake routes to the flooded google servers). No word, also, on the fact that many google-ad-serving sites failed to load at all, as long as the ads could not be displayed.

As a poster-child for the web-enabled in-the-cloud software services business model, Google has the eyes of the business world strongly fixed upon it. There may be a glimmer of doubt in those eyes just about now, and it's not altogether a bad thing. Some more redundancy just might get built into that "Internet cloud" because of it.

Make sure you grab the pretty pictures before going back to whatever you were doing. A 14Gbps drop in network traffic isn't something you get to see every day.