But let me go one step further. An outage with Amazon's AWS or Google AppEngine is not a cloud failure. It is a service failure. Specifically, a service failure in that particular cloud service. Cloud is a special kind of hosted service, but still fundamentally a service.
And guess what? There isn't anything particularly special about a cloud service having a failure. The damage of a particular cloud service having an outage is not particularly or uniquely more damaging than any other service outage of similar kind and magnitude, other than the inevitable chorus of "the cloud is failing, the cloud is failing!"
Oh, I know, one of the benefits of cloud computing is supposed to be rapid restoration, and that is certainly not as automated or as rapid as we'd like today. But for some types of failures, like a server failure, rapid restoration can occur in the time it takes to move and spin up a new instance. Other failures, for instance, in a cloud providers core network services, will take out a larger portion of the particular cloud service, impacting more customers. This may take longer to recover, but that is the nature of a service.
Look, cloud services aren't some magical thing that will guarantee 100% uptime. A disruption in Amazons AWS does not mean a disruption in another cloud service (unless your application relies on the other cloud service, but that is a whole 'nother situation). All this Henny-Penny panic simply clouds (sorry) the real state of cloud stability. Lenny Rachitsky has a list of SaaS and cloud computing health dashboards. Take a look through them and decide for yourself how well the services fare. In many cases the uptime is probably as good or better then you are used to. Cloud computing is still a nascent field, and there is some uncertainty that comes with any new technology, or in this case, a mash-up of many technologies, but the cloud services market won't fail because of a few unrelated, intermittent outages.
I think there are two types of cloud failures: the first is when organizations or individuals decided they didn't want to pay for cloud services and instead went back to a hosted application model. That would result in a lot of cloud services shuttering. That would be a cloud failure. The second would be if the cloud providers didn't live up to the hype that simultaneously they are inflicting on the public, and this is being inflicted upon the cloud providers, resulting in organizations losing interest and taking their business elsewhere. That would be a cloud failure. I don't think either will happen.
