Yesterday morning, Google's Gmail service went down for what the company claims was a small subset of users. As GigaOm noted, when Gmail goes down, it disrupts many types of businesses, and it's often hard to fathom what is actually going on from Google's terse advisories. Yesterday's outage appeared to affect many users, at least judging by complaints and teeth-gnashing visible on Twitter.
This is a perfect example of why cloud computing is not as perfect as its many proponents claim it is, and why businesses will not just haphazardly keep all their data out in the cloud. Instead, I believe they will reach for combinations of in-cloud and out-of-cloud software solutions, just as many of us do individually. That concept leaves ample room for flexible, cloud-focused open source solutions.
