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When the cloud strikes back

Written by Anthony Ferrara Wednesday, 22 April 2009 16:00

There have been countless articles on cloud computing, and the benefits and detractions of it. I'm not going to get into most of them here. I'm not approaching this blog from a developer point of view. I'm approaching it from a user point of view. When I surf the internet, I don't care about scalability, or the traffic that your site can handle, or how much money your servers cost. I care about one thing. Does your site work…

Now there are a lot of sites on the internet that just work well. They load fast and smoothly, and are quite responsive. There are lots of sites that load slow, but progressively (So I know what's going on). And then there are sites that take forever to load, but once they do, they pop up on the page. An increasing trend I've been noticing is that the cloud powered sites seem to be falling into the latter group…

How can I tell? Well, it's quite simple. When the page takes 10 seconds to load, and you see in the browser's taskbar "Transferring data from aws.amazon.com" or "Waiting for blah.cloudfront.net", or something similar for 9 of those 10 seconds, it's quite obvious where the slow down is. More and more I've been noticing this as a trend when sites appear slow. I'll look down, and one of the cloud services seems to blame (or there's a vanity DNS over top of the cloud's name).

As a test on any cloud powered site, run YSlow on it. See how long it takes for the cloud content to be served. My experience with looking at random cloud backed sites, is that it's an extremely significant portion of the site's load time. Then toss in the unpredictability of the cloud (by nature, it's meant to be fault tolerant with no regards for individual request performance), and the potential for slowing site down is not only realistic, it's inevitable. I see it on a daily basis… Do you think that your end users don't?

I keep hearing "cloud this", and "cloud that", and how perfect the cloud is. I've even heard someone say that:

Anyone not developing new sites for the cloud is relocating themselves to a dying breed.

Which, to me, begs the following question... Why should I, as a developer, utilize a service that the user side of me gets extremely frustrated with? Is potentially saving a few dollars really worth annoying and upsetting your end users?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the cloud isn't a good piece of technology. I'm not saying we shouldn't be experimenting and utilizing it. I'm just pointing out that it's still an infant technology. Not to mention the other concerns (well covered elsewhere) with committing a business to the cloud, the question comes. Is it really worth betting the farm on it at this stage? Just my $0.02...

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