Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

No one is spared by "the consultant":

"No one knows what is going on. Not even Gartner. Especially Gartner."

"CloudCamp is just a bunch of vendors getting pissed, eating pizza and comparing the size of their case studies."

"And what is this about Microsoft. They are considered to be one of the four big cloud providers and they are about as cloudy as Steve Ballmer is cool."

It goes on. it does strike a chord. The hype about cloud computing is so ripe for satire. Almost as much as social media - which apparently was the inspiration for this sketch.

The cloud consultant makes his point pretty well about the state of the cloud computing market. Hardly anyone is making any money. Have we not seen this before in our world of over charged tech enthusiasm?

In the meantime, according to the consultant, the only ones making a dime (barely) on cloud computing are a bookseller and a search engine.

"And maybe Salesforce," the consultant says. "And they were cloud before cloud was cloud." ;)

That claim is probably meant to fight back against some people's initial concerns that hosting files on their own PC will leave them open to attack. However, simply addressing security issues is somewhat missing the point about the real trouble with Unite: it's not solving a problem we actually have.

According to the interview, Tetzchner addresses the concerns of those in the security community who fear this technology that aims to put a web server on every PC. He says, "when you're hacking a single system, if you have everything that belongs to everyone in one location, you only need to break in once. If you have it in different computers it's a little more complicated. If you get into one Web server and everyone's data is in there, that's easier than getting into a million computers."

While Opera and the tech community continue to debate the technology's security or lack thereof, the rest of the tech early adopters have simply moved on. Outside of the Opera fanatics (we know who you are!), most of us either skimmed the news briefly or, at the most, may have downloaded the alpha and played with it for a bit. But did the lot of us switch browsers and start sharing files? No.

Why is that? Shouldn't this be just the sort of thing that has techies all a'twitter? What's going on?

Where's the Geek Love?

When Opera revealed the mysterious (and perhaps overly-hyped) Unite, they probably didn't get the response they expected. After numerous emails and teases about a new technology that was going to "reinvent the web," for the most part, the community response was "huh?"

Oh sure, Opera fanboys and girls got it right away as did web developers and other geekier-than-thou folks, but even within the tech community itself, there was confusion...and a bit of "bah humbug" too.

We remember reading through various blog comments where users dismissed Unite as nothing more special than a browser with P2P plugins - a statement that's only true to a point. While the technology enables P2P between browsers, it does so via a proxy server in the middle at operaunite.com. That middle service could easily be a single point of failure for the Unite infrastructure. Opera Unite's proxy goes down, you go down. Sure, that might not be any different than the cloud services we rely on now: Gmail, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, etc. However, even if one of those was to crash-and-burn, it wouldn't take our whole web of services down with it.

But Unite wants to replace just about every cloud app you use today with its own apps for file sharing, social note-posting, chat, photo sharing, and media playing...and that's not to mention how Unite wants to let you host your own web server, too. In other words, Opera wants to (partially) move the cloud back off the the web to your PC.

They even go so far as to claim that their single point of failure is an improvement on what we do today: "We place our trust in these third parties, and we hope for the best, but as long as our own computers are not first class citizens on the Web, we are merely tenants, and hosting companies are the landlords of the Internet," writes product analyst Lawrence Eng.

Thanks, but we'll take our numerous cloud apps over the Unite+PC combo any day.

What Problem Does Unite Solve?

When we started moving from desktop to web, initially testing the waters with email services, later moving to photo and video sharing services, and finally to social networking sites like Facebook that let us communicate and share media, the solutions being implemented were solving real challenges. Setting up desktop email was hard for non-techies (what's my email server's address? what's SMTP?). There were mailbox storage limits and attachment size limits. Letting grandma and grandpa see our digital photos wasn't easy. Getting in touch and staying in touch with our wide network of friends was downright impossible. But then these web applications came along and made it possible for everyone to use technology. They were simple, straightforward, and fun. And soon a Web revolution was underway. A real one, that is.

What problem does Opera Unite solve that could kick off the next revolution of the web? Are we having trouble with cloud services? Are we concerned that they're so insecure that moving everything via P2P through Opera is somehow better? Is Unite easier than Facebook? Than flickr? Heck, than email? No.

It's not easier for us techies by any means (especially since its tied to one browser) and it's not even close to being easy for the "regular folks" of the online world...you know, the ones who don't even know what a browser is

So security concerns aside, what is Unite doing for us that we can't get elsewhere? Anyone?

If you think we're missing the point, chime in below.

AppLogic, as we wrote in 2006, "allows Web companies to manage - and scale - all their applications, servers and storage with just a browser." The AppStore offers software stacks for AppLogic deployments, and its catalog spans all kinds of elements and applications, from networking and server components to storage solutions, as well as management and monitoring tools.

AppStore users will find pre-configured, ready-to-use elements from software vendors, many free or offered as trial versions with other appliances offered on a pay-per-use basis. Data center architects and consultants can package and publish ready-to-run app infrastructures, complete with capabilities such as clustered solutions, high availability, disaster recovery, on-demand scalability, and automated backups and security.

Initial AppStore vendors include CohesiveFT, Layer 7 Technologies, SOASTA, Tap In Systems, and Zeus Technology. 3Tera is also seeking additional infrastructure and software vendors to round out AppStore offerings in time for its beta release in Q3 2009.

"Monitoring cloud assets, scaling capacity automatically, and balancing traffic efficiently have been among the most requested Amazon EC2 features from our customers," said Peter DeSantis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. "Together, these capabilities provide customers more control of their AWS resources and enable them to architect for even better performance, resilience and cost savings."

CloudWatch gives Amazon customers visibility into resource use, operational performance, and overall demand patterns, including metrics such as CPU use, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. Auto Scaling ensures EC2 usage increases during traffic spikes to maintain performance and decreases during lulls to reduce costs, making it particularly appropriate for apps with frequent use fluctuations. Elastic Load Balancing allows for fault tolerance in applications, detects unhealthy instances within a pool, and reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored.

Amazon hopes these features will improve application performance, lower costs, and make life easier for developers and entrepreneurs. Amazon CloudWatch and Elastic Load Balancing are available on a pay-as-you-go basis, and Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and carries no additional fees. Features are currently available in the U.S. and should be available in the EU shortly.

According to the company, during a routine upgrade on Friday night, they ran into some problems with photo storage. The issue appears to have stemmed from several drives failing at once. Because simultaneous hardware failure such as this is rare, Facebook says they're still trying to figure out what happened.

In the meantime, though, the photos are being copied to new drives - a process that can take some time due to the large amount of data that was affected. The company asked users not to worry because they store photos in a way that maintains multiple copies of the data in case of hardware failures such as this. By early this week, everything should be back to normal.

The Cloud is Not Perfect

This recent issue with Facebook photos is just one of many cloud-based outages and issues we've seen recently - a trend that moved some to question the level of trust we should have for these online services. Over the past few weeks, we've seen the social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia completely fry and lose all their customers' data when the service's database crashed and took with it a half a terabyte of information. Unfortunately, no reliable backups were to be had.

But while Ma.gnolia may have represented the dangers of trusting a small startup with your data, Google has proved that even companies as large as themselves are not immune from problems. A recent four-hour Gmail outage from routine maintenance "gone wrong," caused a cascading failure in Google's European data centers.

And on the heels of the Gmail outage, Google Groups also went down for some time. All groups were affected for a short while.

These incidents led Google to follow in the footsteps of other cloud storage companies like SalesForce.com and Amazon in the launch of a Google Apps status dashboard so they could better communicate with customers whether their online applications were up and running.

In Google's case, repairs were made and customers were credited as necessary, but even so many businesses and individuals were affected in ways that can't necessarily be quantified so easily. Although some quickly rallied to Google's defense, reminding that Gmail's uptime is often much better than on-site hosted email systems, the point many folks are missing is that unlike in "the old days," not everyone keeps copies of their data on their computers anymore - so when the cloud shuts down, that data is just gone, albeit only temporarily in most cases.

Be Safe, Use More than One Service!

Still, even if you've switched over to cloud services for storing and accessing the majority of your data, you can prevent outages from affecting you. The trick is to store your data in more than one online service or use a hybrid cloud/desktop solution. For example, if your email is mission critical, use an IMAP-enabled desktop or mobile client. Those doing so during Gmail's outage were able to access their inbox to retrieve old emails - they just couldn't send and receive.

For photos, like the ones that recently went missing from Facebook, there are a number of online services where they could have been stored. Today, there's really no reason to only keep your photos in one spot. An easy way to upload photos to multiple sites is to use a tool like Pixelpipe which shoots photos, videos, and audio files to over 60 social networks, photo/video sites, and blogs.

Even documents can be stored in more than one location. Google Docs and Zoho may be the best known of the web office services, but you could also keep critical files saved to your computer then backed up using another third party backup service like Mozy. Or you could upload files to storage sites like Google's own Google Sites or Microsoft's "Sharepoint Lite" Office Live.

No matter what you do, there's always a chance of losing data, even if you only save files on your computer, completely eschewing the cloud altogether. But that's probably not as safe as keeping files in multiple online services. With the number of services available, an outage shouldn't mean we have to lose access to our files. Use hybrid solutions or spread your data across multiple services instead and you'll almost always be okay, outage or not.