What happens when the cloud goes away?

A few lessons learned this week about preparedness and where data really lives... those who live by the cloud might also die by it.

We are at about 1000 feet, just up the hill from Sacramento on the road to Tahoe. We might get a very light dusting of snow once or twice a winter, but when I awoke Monday and saw nearly 8 inches, I got a bad feeling. Not that I don't enjoy the beauty of a crisp winter day, but when this hits an area that usually doesn't have to deal with it, it severely taxes the infrastructure. Sure enough, it melted a bit, then dropped to 22 that night, leaving us with a crunchy permafrost that may be around for at least the rest of the week. We lived in Incline Village for many years, so I'm quite familiar with snow and ice issues. Unfortunately, our local Comcast office wasn't quite as prepared, and we have been without cable since Monday.

Not that I can't go a few days without TV, but we also have VOIP phone service, as well as high speed internet. This got me thinking about our reliance on "the cloud."

I've had disagreements over the years with Comcast, but generally experience extremely fast connectivity and excellent service. My gripe is that when they go down like this, they go down hard. But if anything qualifies as an "Act of God", a once-in-a-century storm does. There wasn't much they could do to prepare, and I'm sure they are working hard to get it all back in order. But meanwhile, what's a person to do who relies on the Internet for not only their work, but an ever-increasing presence in many aspects of day to day life? I'm a professional web developer, and use the 'net not just for creating and testing work, but ever increasingly as a new way to handle most communications and information issues. Going somewhere? No wasting time folding out of date maps when I can just click on a link to Google Maps and get exact driving directions, complete with satellite and street views of my route.  Need to know what a word means? Look it up with an online dictionary. What's on TV? Online listing services. How long to cook a cake? Google some recipes. You get the idea.

And when it goes away? Up the creek without the proverbial paddle. 15 years ago I was doing a lot of thiswith my computer, but from CD-ROMS or local programs. Now its all on the cloud. And when that cloud goes away, the dogs bark and grown men cry.

I have a few deadlines at work and needed to get back up ASAP. But living in the country, what options do I have? Comcast could be down for a week or longer. There are downed trees everywhere and lots of ice damage, and they don't even have electricity at many of the repeater stations, because PG&E has also been overwhelmed by storm damage. I could drive down to Sacramento and rent a desk and bandwidth at a co-work facility, but that's nearly a two hour round trip, plus I'd have to schlep a bunch of hardware. I don't have any neighbors with a good connection right now that I could mooch. I could have a DSL line installed, but that's another week at least. I won't use satellite; too expensive and too much latency.

So I drove down to the AT&T store, hoping to get a mobile broadband modem. Smart folks at AT&T (networking and Unix did spring from their labs), but from a business standpoint, they  are mostly explotitative dunces. They'd sell me a modem, but only if I were to sign up for two years at $60/month. Arrgh! No way I'm going to commit to $1500, because to add insult to injury, they have a 5GB permonth daata cap! Heck, I can burn that in 2 days. How? Streaming, downloading, doing development, doing all the little every day things. Exactly the things they want me to believe are possible with their wonderful technology. At the rate things are evolving, 5GB/month would be a joke in two years. Not acceptable.

I then went to the Verizon store, and got much better treatment (and the sales folks were exceedingly nice too). I got this slick little broadband modem for $129, with no contract. Unlike AT&T, they have a pay as you go plan available. I can get 500MB for $50, and renew it when I need more. Sounds much better than $1500, anyway. I was a bit concerned about the data rate, but am getting about 800K, which is perfectly fine for most sites. Just no streaming, and having to be careful about anything I download. It installed effortlessly, and after an hour of checking some sites and getting a few hundred emails, I've used about 14M. I'm hoping to have Comcast back up within a few days, and won't need it for day to day work. But it will come in really handy at conferences and other places where bandwidth is unreliable.

I'm very impressed with how well this works, and had a very positive experience with Verizon. But they also have a 5GB monthly cap, even with their "unlimited" contract plans. This needs to be resolved; data shouldn't be that expensive to exchange. I'm paying nearly $50/month for cable broadband, plus almost $200 to AT&T for cell service; my two sons and I each have iPhones, with their high data surcharge. They are incredible little devices that have greatly enhaced our lives, but its a drag about the bandwith costs.

What finalized my decision about not going with AT&T was the news report today that they admitted their networks are incapable of handling the traffic they claim they can provide, and will be starting measures to "discourage" the use of excess bandwidth. That means its going to get more expensive, not less.

This all made me think about the increasing digital devide between the data haves and have-nots, but also about our reliance on the cloud. When we get dependent on fast and easy information, it is a jarring shock when it goes away.

I recently upgraded one of my computers from VIsta to Windows 7. While not as painless as a MacOS upgrade, it went well, but I had to reinstall all my apps. A few years ago, the would have meant fishing around for CDs and backups; these days its easier to just pull everything down from the cloud.

More and more of my data now reside out there somewhere. I've been resisting moving to more Google apps; not that I don't like them, but am fearful of not having local data. A netbook wouldn't be of much use to me without connectivity. In fact, much of what I do wouldn't be possible.

With no TV, I thought I could transfer some movies from my computer to my Tivo. Uh uh; even though they are all on my LAN, when the net goes down, for some reason I can't see my two Tivos from my computers. WTF?

Sophisticated, post-web2.0 sites have their issues too. I'm testing some new features on a very large commercial site that uses all the latest bells and whistles. I keep a local version of the code base and database on my PC, and use a local LAMP stack for developing. Ha ha, I thought, I'll get a lot done without the distractions of the live Internet. Wrong; I kept getting timeouts. Tracing through with a debugger, I found a dozen or more cURL and fsocketopen calls as the page tried to load. These are to Google ads and some third party partners. The code dutifully tried to connect to the remote servers, but ran out of time waiting for data. And don't even get me started about AJAX! Kinda put a crimp in my plans for a serious debug session.

A few minor fails, and a couple of large ones. I keep copies of most of my data (smart boy, doesn't like getting repeatedly burned), but you can't have everything up to date. And some things you can't get copies of at all (try to avoid them). As usual, the problems and solutions are part technical and part social/human ones. It is so attractive and seductive to move data to the cloud, but we must be careful that it's still our data. If you can't reach it, it can be real hell.