After last week's meltdown at Amazon, a lot of people (including me) are talking about what needs to change in cloud computing to provide users with a greater degree of confidence in cloud and the vendors that provide it.   So far, I have focused on the customers of cloud as having a great deal of influence over the levels of service they experience, since ultimately they have the power whether it is in how they use the service or which provider they choose.  The more informed they are, the better the cloud ecosystem will perform.

However, there is a major problem with this approach (nothing's simple, right?)  Customers can relatively easily inform themselves (or hire employees, consultants, or professional services) to help them make the best use of cloud services.  However, what they cannot easily do is find out all the limitations, gotchas, constraints, tradeoffs, and misrepresentations that cloud vendors suffer from, much like the colo and hosting vendors have for over a decade.   For example, Amazon is essentially a "black box" so even a very IT-literate customer can't effectively engineer around their limitations.   And Amazon has a very supportable position in not releasing all its secrets to the world for fear of losing its competitive edge.  This obfuscation in the name of protection of intellectual property and market position goes well beyond Amazon, however.  Based on my experiences, every cloud vendor and managed services provider also is part of this conspiracy of silence.  And amazingly, what I hear from investors and analysts about problems with various cloud technologies is not published on the internet or spoken of in conferences.  There are many reasons for this, not the least of which are gag clauses that equipment and software vendors write into their contracts.

For example, here at ENKI we use a number of branded products and technologies to provide our services.    The sales/service/evaluation contracts we signed with these vendors specifically prevent us from sharing lists of bugs, performance analyses, or other damaging information about their products with the public.   Again, it's quite reasonable that vendors we do business with be protected from incorrect or malicious information or misinformation about their products.  However, if their products have serious flaws - something that is going to be universally true about anything that is new or changing rapidly - then our customers have a right to know the risks they are taking with using those products in our services.  But we have no way to let them know except to call them individually.   Our only choice is to stop or avoid using the vendor's product, which is something we have done a few times in our history.  We can't even announce why we are discontinuing the use of the product, according to most of our contracts.

Every day, I see ENKI's competitors touting this or that product or technology, many of which we have already discarded as fatally flawed from the perspective of reliability, security, or usability, yet we can not have an open discussion about them on a public forum (though we're happy to do so individually!)   And I think about the hapless customers signing up to use their services, only to face business-critical limitations later.   Just today I got three marketing emails in my inbox from competitors using software systems to provide cloud services that suffer from horrific bugs.

While all this secrecy is understandable, and for the moment legally correct and enforceable, it is a disservice to the cloud-using and cloud-selling community.   You can't really choose a technology based on only its positive features!  Let's face it: every piece of software and hardware has flaws, but the ones that persist still offer enough value to keep people using them.  This isn't just true of cloud, but many IT products, in particular large, expensive software systems (which I'll also have to let remain unnamed) suffer from long-running outstanding bugs and terrible service.   I only see two ways out of this dilemma: either something blows up as it did last week, or software/cloud/hardware vendors permit and encourage a more open dialog as many Web2.0 companies have bravely begun doing. 

What can you, the cloud/IT/software-buying public do about it?  Not a lot, but you can start by letting go of the expectation of perfection, which drives vendors to try to hide bugs and problems.   An easy way to do this is to look at your vendor from a relationship point of view: when the inevitable problems crop up, are they willing and capable of responding?    This is no more - and no less - than you'd expect from your own IT department, right?

All this secrecy puts us at ENKI in an uncomfortable bind, since our corporate values are based on openness and transparency as a means of honoring our customers.   So if you have questions about a cloud technology please contact me.  I'll be happy to share what I know.  But please, don't expect me to sign my name to it!