Charlie Wood over at Moonwatcher has a post about how things “can get ugly” when the loosely coupled pieces start decoupling.

He’s dead right in what he’s saying about the different outages and how lame the response has been. It’s interesting to contrast the response of the Enterprise utility vendors to a more consumer facing group like SixApart. When their TypePad service suffered outages, they went so far as to let people effected choose their amount of remuneration.

However, what shouldn’t be missed in all of this is that right now most of the utility service providers (such as Amazon’s S3) are already providing a higher degrees of reliability than comparable systems built in-house.

If you haven’t already you should really checkout the SmugMug cost saving discussion which included the following quote:

But wait! It gets even better! Amazon has been so reliable over the last 7 months (considerably more reliable than our own internal storage, which I consider to be quite reliable), that just last week we made S3 an even more fundamental part of our storage architecture.

[tags]Amazon, Moonwatcher, S3, EnterpriseComputing[/tags]

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