Lady Gaga Kills The Cloud - What Does This Mean for Amazon Cloud Drive, EC2, andOther Cloud Services

Leave it to Lady Gaga to take Amazon's servers down to a crawl or a complete standstill. Yesterday Amazon offered Lady Gaga's Born This Way album for a mere 99 cents as compared to its $11.99 price for the standard album. The only problem is that Amazon's servers were so overwhelmed that some users are complaining that even 10 hours later they still only have some of their songs downloaded or worse can't even connect to Amazon's servers.

So, aside from the marketing and sales aspects of this promotion - whether Amazon is doing this based on concerns over Apple's upcoming cloud service or to entice customers over to its Cloud Storage by offering 20GB as part of the promotion, one thing remains clear - Amazon is having technical issues in supporting the very architecture that they are offering to their customers. The premise of The Cloud is to support scalability and to offer the ability to automatically scale up based on demand. With the Lady Gaga debacle and the problems last April that brought down major websites who were customers of Amazon's EC2 Cloud Service (Quora.com, Reddit.com, GroupMe.com and Scvngr.com) it brings into question the ability for companies such as Amazon to deliver the goods.

Yes, the Cloud is still a relatively new and emerging technology and it has and will continue to hit bumps along the way to stability. How will the news affect your decisions on implementing Cloud technologies for your infrastructure? Will you wait to deploy to the Cloud? Is the idea of handing over the keys to your infrastructure still appealing?

I for one will probably take a more blended hybrid approach for now. Not putting all of our apples in the Cloud cart, but utilizing some of our non-critical infrastructure within the Cloud while continuing to utilize more traditional non-cloud based approaches for the more critical day-to-day operations. As the Cloud continues to mature then we'll consider moving more services over, but that will be done only with a proven standard offering sitting in the wings as a backup until at least a good amount of time has gone by and things are more proven.