Voxeo Talks

Can you trust the cloud computing platform to be there when you need it? Is the platform reliable enough to always be available? If you are going to move your applications off of your own servers and “into the cloud”, can you trust that your customers will be able to get to those applications?

In light of Google App Engine’s downtime yesterday, people are asking that question again. TechCrunch’s article provided this cute little graphic on the right and said “Stuff like this tends to make developers nervous about adopting a new platform.”

Downtime definitely does raise concerns, but let’s put yesterday’s Google App Engine outage in perspective – Google has been very clear that GAE is a preview release for developers to test applications. Nowhere have they said that you should run production apps on the GAE platform. Not yet anyway. It’s a place for developers to experiment – as I did with use GAE to store VoiceXML applications. Google has since explained the issue they found and at the moment everything seems to be fixed. That’s the reason they are running the beta test that they are… get a large number of people on the platform and see what issues are to be found. By the time they get Google App Engine out into production, you’ll have to think they’ll have sorted many of these issues out. But for right now GAE is definitely “beta”.

Now, when you look at cloud computing platforms to run your production applications, you do need to be asking questions like:

• What kind of availability guarantees / Service Level Agreements (SLAs) does the platform vendor provide? Are there actual guarantees or is it simply “best effort”?
• What kind of geographic redundancy is built into the underlying network? If there’s a natural disaster in one region will it wipe out all access to your applications?
• What kind of network redundancy is built into the underlying network? Is the “cloud” all ultimately running on a single carrier’s connections to the Internet? (Bad idea?) Are there multiple carriers servicing each geographic location?
• What kind of physical redundancy is built into the data centers? In the end you need electrical power, air conditioning and physical security to ensure that the actual servers upon which your apps are running continue to run. What is the “cloud” platform built on?
• What kind of monitoring does the vendor perform? Is there a 24×7x365 Network Operations Center (NOC) that is monitoring the health of the network and all applications?
• What kind of scalability is in the cloud computing platform? Can it grow as your application grows? Can it handle extreme spikes of traffic?
• What kind of security, both network and physical, is part of the computing platform? What steps does the vendor take to ensure the network is protected from attackers?
• Finally, what will the vendor do if there is downtime? How quickly will you be contacted? How quickly will the vendor respond? Will the downtime be reflected in your bill?

Here at Voxeo we’re obviously huge believers in moving voice applications into the “cloud”. We’ve been helping customers do that since 1999 and our hosted Prophecy IVR Platform is one of the largest VoiceXML hosting platforms in the world. We have a rock-solid, ultra-reliable, secure, distributed platform for running your voice applications. To our knowledge, we’re the only ones in our industry to back up that belief with a 100% uptime guarantee… which means we pay you if we have any downtime. (Subject to certain conditions outlined on the page.)

We welcome questions like the ones above. We’re glad to talk about our platform for voice applications. (Contact us if you want more info.)

You can push your applications out into the “cloud”… there are many happy users of cloud-computing services from Amazon, Joyent, our own platform and many others. But you do have to ask questions like these and understand whether or not the application platform will be there when you need it!

P.S. And for those who absolutely want an on-premise product, a few years ago we made our software also available as a premise product… we also support some fascinating hybrid models I’ll write about in the future…

Related posts:

1. Voice & Cloud Computing: “Pushing IVR Into The Cloud, Part 1: Making the Move”
2. See Voxeo in the Google I/O Sandbox
3. Launching your own *platform* for voice applications using Voxeo’s computing cloud
4. Joyent video: What is Cloud Computing?
5. What is “cloud computing”? Slashdot debates the question…

Tags: Cloud Computing, Google, reliability

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