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.