Silly question for you to ponder: even though mistakes happen, and they are inevitable, in the evolving space of cloud computing, is ever acceptable for the structures which host the cloud to be “down”?

I wonder if we’re yet at the dawn of an era where enough businesses are building — and depending on the reliability thereof — their systems through “cloud” servers, where the kind of outage that Amazon’s S3 service, for example, is unacceptable.

Sure, its understandable, but even the pea-brained amongst us (including myself, admittedly) can “get” that dollars … *LOTS* of dollars … are lost when your website can’t do what it needs to do. Sometimes that need is a small thing (i.e. avatars), but sometimes its large. Like SmugMug’s inability to serve photos. As a photosharing web service, I presume such things are important.

On presuming things, I do presume that cloud computing is something that’s here to stay. But are enough businesses building themselves *on* a cloud infrastructure *without* personal redundancies, that this kind of outage is beyond a “whoops”, but unacceptable?

(and that’s beyond the whole topic of what’s in their terms of service, and the legalities and repercussions of violating what’s been promised, and so on, and etcetera, and so forth).