Cloud

Goolge Play Music

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Once again Google just tackled me. While still not being completely satisfied with my OwnCloud + FolderSync setup that still requires too much manual steps to be really comfortable, Google released Play Music in Germany last week. As I am already a happy Android user owning a Nexus S and a Galaxy Tab, I had to give it a try. One thing it does not seem to do yet is uploading existing Music from the Android devices, BUT there is Google Music Manager for Linux. With that tool I was able to easily upload all my existing music albums from my local file server at home to my Google Play account. The best thing about it is, that it does not need to upload all files if they can be identified and found in Google’s music database. Now I have access to all the music from my Android devices as well and if necessary I can download them directly from Google for offline usage. Google Play Music allows to store 20,000 songs for free plus the ones you buy through their music store, which probably becomes my preferred choice over Amazon now.

And It would not be Google if they would not offer a full download of the library via Music Manager. That of cause makes it feel less painful to trust them with storing all your music, as it makes you feel like you could break up with them at any time.

Did you know the cloud is a place somewhere in Ireland?

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This was one of the best sentences I read on slides this weekend at the FrOSCon 2012 and it reminds me, why I am so sceptical about the “put everything in the cloud” hype. Although every cloud infrastructure provider tries to make a huge secret out of their datacenter locations, it seems to be of widespread knowledge that especially Microsoft’s cloud datacenteres for Office 365 and Azure for European customers are located in the Dublin area. Also Amazon seems to use a datacenter in Dublin as their main European hub. So it should not be too surprising to read, that a couple of weeks ago both, Micorosft and Amazon, customers were affected by an outage in a datacenter in Dublin. That’s why you should always keep in mind that storing something in the cloud does not necessarily mean that is is stored at more than one location. It might just be as single place….somewhere in Ireland.