ReadWriteWeb

For all the optimism surrounding the potential of computing in the cloud - lower costs, better performance, easier scaling - it isn't a perfect system. No matter how distributed and redundant the architecture or how rigorous the backup system, when it comes right down to it, there's a complex series of hoops through which the data has to jump to travel between the user and where it actually resides on a piece of physical hardware. And when a segment of that process fails, all the benefits of the cloud suddenly seem all the less magical.

Take a recent unfortunate situation for Ylastic, a company that provides a single front-end to manage Amazon Web Services, who was recently an unwillingly participant in one of these cloud bursts.