Last week a "networking event" knocked out Amazon's Virginia data center, and that outage took a large number of other companies' web sites with it, showing the extent to which the Internet at large has come to depend on Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure.

I don't think the idea of cloud computing itself will be seriously called into question because of this (although it certainly did not help it took four whole days for Amazon's engineers to bring everything back up, and there have been complaints about the company's lack of transparency about the incident). Many of the sites that were knocked out would probably not have existed without it in the first place, and if you put all your online eggs into the Virginia basket you have now learned a valuable lesson. While it entails extra effort and cost, it is possible to build a cloud-based service that can survive the loss of a whole data center. Even using just Amazon's offerings, you get to choose from several "availability zones" spread over five data centers (Virginia, California, Ireland, Singapore, Tokyo). Just like the Internet itself, the cloud can be made very resilient to component failure.

It also does not seem like Amazon's position itself will be weakened, either. The consensus seems to be that it was their fault that their service went down, and that they could have communicated the situation better, but that it was not their fault if someone completely depended on them. It would have been that someone who either deemed that risk acceptable or did not do their homework.

At least there was apparently no data lost, and thus in a way, no real harm done (but of course, making backups would have been your own responsibility, too).