Amazon EC2

Microsoft waited two days to discuss the reason for BPOS outages; users complained it seemed less like an enterprise provider than a company "that can't support its own software."

Thursday, April 21, is a day that Michael Downing, the CEO and CFO of social media start-up Tout, won't soon forget. In the wee hours of the morning, Downing learned a harsh lesson: cloud computing is not bulletproof.

Picking a good cloud provider is a lot like picking a good hosting provider; you have to ask the right questions and plan for when having the right answers doesn't prevent failure.

The servers are back up and users can once again check in on Foursquare and ask questions on Quora, but the legacy of last week's Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) outage will live on and provide important lessons for businesses as they look to cloud computing for their IT future.

Despite the heightened focus on cloud availability and uptime caused by Amazon's prolonged service outage last week, security will likely remain the bigger long-term concern for enterprises, analysts say.

While the failures have been catastrophic, perhaps embarrassing and will hopefully prompt a review of application deployment and recovery strategies, they are not serious enough to change the dynamics of cloud adoption in short or long term.

For a company that's known as the dominant player in the cloud market, Amazon's troubles on Thursday means a black eye for the company and for the cloud in general.

Open-source code, support for a variety of tools and databases, available in your data center or someone else's, Cloud Foundry aims at Azure's weaknesses without adding too many of VMware's.

VPNs, subnets, access control, make VMs in the look like LANs and make low-cost shared-tenancy look like pricey single-tenant clouds.

Oddly, given how ephemeral the whole cloud-service environment can be, no major vendor has made length-of-service guarantees an issue. Until now.

The New York Times cobbled together a Ruby application to run on Amazon to report on live election results