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Monday, July 28, 2008

Lost in the Clouds

MobileMe is facing problems endemic to cloud computing.

By Rich Parr

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Summer storm: The launch of Apple’s MobileMe service proved two things: cloud computing is very appealing to consumers, and it’s very hard to get right.
Credit: MobileMe

The logo for MobileMe, Apple's upgrade to its .Mac suite of Web applications, comprises the icons of four of the service's major features--e-mail, calendar, address book, and photo gallery--floating in a cottony white cumulus. The image announces an elegant, user-friendly take on cloud computing, syncing users' data wirelessly between Macs and PCs, the Web, iPhones, and iPod touches.

MobileMe has garnered positive reviews for its features and its intuitive user interface. But accessing Apple's cloud has been a stormy experience for some users. The service's debut on July 10 was marred by delays and missing features. Apple apologized for the launch troubles, but since then some users have altogether lost access to their e-mail.

The company also backed off from using the term "push"--which implies near-instantaneous synchronization between devices--in describing the service. While MobileMe does push changes made on the Web or an iPhone or iPod touch, changes made from a Mac or PC can take up to 15 minutes to propagate.

Apple was contacted for this article but was unavailable for comment.

Cloud computing has been touted as a potential tool for everything from improving business infrastructure to helping consumers keep tabs on their contacts. Storing data in the "cloud" of the Internet rather than locally allows users to access that information anywhere and at any time.

Some cloud-computing applications--like Google's Gmail, Google Calendar, and the Google Docs document-sharing and -editing service--live entirely in the cloud: users' data is stored remotely and accessed via a Web browser. Other applications--like the contact-syncing service Plaxo--use the cloud to back up data and keep it up to date across multiple computers and mobile devices.

MobileMe combines both approaches, syncing data between computers while providing access to a user's e-mail, contacts, calendar, and photos via the Web. But the service's troubles illustrate an obstacle to the mass acceptance of cloud computing: the average user has a low tolerance for downtime.

"Availability is essential in cloud computing," says Thomas Vander Wal, founder of the IT consultancy InfoCloud Solutions. "If constant access to information and objects is a requirement, then cloud computing may not be a viable option without alternate solutions." The problem is not limited to Apple. Vander Wal notes that a July 20 outage on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) affected a host of Web-based applications that use it to store data online.
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Tags

Apple cloud cloud computing Plaxo Web apps

Comments

  • File synchronization
    squall on 07/28/2008 at 11:15 AM
    Posts:
    1
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    2/5
    In addition, Microsoft now offers something called "Foldershare" which allows you to synchronize the files on several computers. Foldershare used to be an independent company, but they were snapped up by MS.

    I've been using it to sync my research work and it works quite well, even though I know traditionally Microsoft has a bad rap.

    Peter
    How Your Electronics Work
    http://www.howyourelectronicswork.com
    Rate this comment: 12345
    • Re: File synchronization
      cslemp on 07/28/2008 at 1:30 PM
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      1
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      3/5
      Foldershare is nice, but Mesh is even better. My Mesh experience has been terrific. Three primary machines all synchronizing and can remote desktop to any of them. I'm even accessing the files and adding photos using my 2-year old smartphone.
      Rate this comment: 12345
  • Poorly written article
    plaak on 07/29/2008 at 9:02 AM
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    1
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    3/5
    This article doesn't live up to the quality that I've come to expect from this magazine.  No explanation is given for why cloud computing is inherently less reliable than the technologies it is supposed to replace.  Given that Cloud Computing is advertised as and should have the potential to delivery higher reliability than traditional service methods, some kind of explanation is expected.  Of course, the users of the cloud services are dependent on their Internet connectivity (versus, say, having the data live on their own LAN or HardDrive).  However, these connectivity requirements are not unique to cloud computing as many of the services that they are replacing also require this (e.g., corporate email, file services, hosted applications, etc). 

    What's more, I believe (but am not certain) that both the Amazon S3 outage and MobileMe's issues had little to do with Internet Connectivity and everything to do with hiccup's on the service side (e.g., operator error, hardware issues, software bugs, etc).  In other words, Amazon and Apple likely didn't give enough consideration to scalability, potential for operator error, etc.  Clearly cloud computing is not a panacea that will allow its operators to give short shrift to day-to-day operations and software developers to completely ignore reliability issues.  However, it shows great promise to improve the accessibility, reliability, speed, and reduce the cost of a large percentage of computing services currently out there despite some initial stumbles (mind you, I've yet to see anyone compare what the reliability might have been for these same customers had they tried to host their data in-house)

    If the thrust of this article is simply that the home consumer shouldn't yet replace local HD storage with the Cloud in certain circumstances, then you may have a point.  However, this same argument would hold true for any other local-storage replacement technology (e.g., storing data on a remote NAS).  You should clarify this.
    Rate this comment: 12345
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