A few weeks ago, I poked fun at the overreactions to Gmail’s service outage on September 1st. At the same time, however, I made it clear that, for some people, such a disruption can be a seriously harmful event. The follow-up conversations from that blog post were not exactly what I intended, but I am glad they took place nonetheless.
This past week (Thursday, September 24th, to be precise), Gmail had another unplanned outage. It wasn’t as serious or prolonged (mainly affecting Contacts and Chat, though many were without e-mail as well), but it did not go unnoticed, both within our office walls and on our twitter feeds. And while many are sounding the Chicken Little alarms again, there are others who have a more positive opinion about what this means for the longevity of this type of software as a service. For example, Phil Wainewright over at ZDNet had a great article entitled, “Why you should be glad about Gmail failures” — a must-read for anyone using Google’s enterprise offering, or having doubts about its viability.
Aaron Bertrand
Senior Data Architect, OTOlabs
http://www.otolabs.com
Tags: cloud, GMail, saas, service outages, software as a service
