This was never supposed to happen. Amazon Web Services is the Titanic of cloud hosting, designed with backups to the backups' backups that prevent hosted websites and applications from failing.

Yet, like the famous ocean liner, Amazon's cloud crashed this week, taking with it Reddit, Quora, FourSquare, Hootsuite, parts of the New York Times, ProPublica and about 70 other sites. The massive outage raised questions about the reliability of AWS and the cloud itself.

It was supposed to work like this: Thousands of companies use AWS to run their websites through a service called Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. Rather than hosting their sites on their own servers, these customers turn to Amazon, which essentially rents out its unused -- and highly intricate -- server capacity.

Optaros Intros E-Commerce SaaS Solution

written by Raju Shanbhag, TMCnet Contributor

Optaros has announced OCentric e-commerce SaaS, which makes use of Amazon Web Services “AWS,” to provide unique client solutions at the same price point as one-size-fits-all e-commerce SaaS vendors, according to company officials.

OCentric provides functionality traditionally found in e-commerce, Web content management and community platforms all in one package so companies can implement new retail concepts that are popular today, such as group buying, private sales, deal-a-day and more.

An initiative from The Open Group has developed a set of key considerations for how to build and measure return on investment (ROI) for cloud computing initiatives from a business perspective. By examining the benefits cloud computing offers organizations and showing the potential return it can provide from the beginning, companies may find it easier to gain buy-in for cloud initiatives from the executive team, as well as the IT department.

Cloud computing has been described as a technological change brought about by the convergence of a number of new and existing technologies. The promise of cloud computing is identified primarily by the following key technical characteristics:

• The ability to create the illusion of infinite capacity performance is the same if scaled for one or one hundred or one thousand users with consistent service-level characteristics.
• Abstraction of the infrastructure so applications are not locked into devices or locations.
• Pay-as-you-go usage of the IT service; you only pay for what you use, with no or minimal up-front investment costs. You typically just use the service through a connection and device.
• Service is on-demand and able to scale up and down with near instant availability. Typically, no forward planning forecast is required.
• Access to applications and information can be obtained from any access point.

But this is only half the story. These technical characteristics can also be found in many non-disruptive technology solutions. What sets the promise of cloud computing apart is that the rate of change, magnitude of cost reduction and specific technical performance impact that cloud computing can provide is not just incremental, but can give a five-to-ten times order of magnitude of improvement.