Cloud computing providers focus on providing an efficient, scalable environment in which applications can be deployed and provide for their availability with load balancing services and health monitoring and elastic scalability.

But it can’t assure availability of your network. The Rackspace outage late last year was allegedly caused by a peering issue.

You know, a network, problem.

UPDATE: “The issues resulted from a problem with a router used for peering and backbone connectivity located outside the data center at a peering facility, which handles approximately 20% of Rackspace’s Dallas traffic,” Rackspace said in an incident report on its blog. “The problems stemmed from a configuration and testing procedure made at our new Chicago data center, creating a routing loop between the Chicago and Dallas data centers. This activity was in final preparation for network integration between the Chicago and Dallas data centers. The network integration of the facilities was scheduled to take place during the monthly maintenance window outside normal business hours, and today’s incident occurred during final preparations.”

We spend so much time worrying about application availability that we often overlook – both purposefully and accidentally – one of the most basic facts on which applications are built today: the existence of a working, reliable core network.

more of the Cloud Computing Journal article from Lori MacVittie