First of all, let me explain just how much I love google. I know, you love google too, but I’ve been pretty much a google evangelist since 2000. I practically live in google via iGoogle and use gmail, docs, reader and of course search on the daily. That being said, today’s outage, or least disruption in our regularly scheduled programming was a little disturbing and made me realize just how much I rely on google. But this isn’t going to be one of those cautionary tails about the cloud. I understand that shit happens and sometimes things go down. I mean, sometimes the lights go out but you don’t hear PECO apologizing or people nay saying electricity.
What I’m advocating here are alternatives. We need plan B and need we need to be a fualt-tollerant, disptributed system of systems. Yes, google’s system is distributed and there’s always yahoo (asif) but we’ve now seen the disruption that issues with core routing systems can cuase. I think that all this talk about “the cloud” is really missing the point that we are the cloud and every single pc, networked appliance and mobile device could be contributing to it and carrying that load. What we need is to crowd source the cloud.