Its not been a good week for the web - on Thursday google mail was down for most of the day, also Digg and a few other sites also experienced outages. Is this the end of the world as we know it, or just a reminder that web applications seldom have 100% uptime and availability. This harks back to the article I wrote last year on Service Level Agreements in a Web 2.0 World, where I talk about the lack of any kind of service agreement in the current generation of web applications, and the consequences for those individuals or business which rely on them.Since that article, Google has made some steps around SLA’s within their Google Apps for Business and Education packages, which is good to see, by for the average user there is still a chance that outages and downtime can leave you without access to your data. But, is there a way round it?Interestingly, this week a company called Bandwagon unveiled an application which can backup your iTunes music library. The twist? It is based upon a concept labeled BYOS - Bring Your Own Storage. So, Bandwagon backs up your music to Amazon S3 (Amazon’s online pay-per-gb storage). If Bandwagon ceases to exist, all your music is safe on S3 and you can access it using a plethora of applications such as JungleDisk, which lets you mount S3 as a normal network drive. There are also plans allow users to backup their music to any FTP server, or other online storage solutions like OmniDisk.This is perfect for both Bandwagon, who no longer need to maintain the infrastructure and provide the bandwidth for their customers; and for the customer who is always in a position to access their music - even if they choose not to continue the Bandwagon service. So, why can’t this technique be applied to other applications?As the saying goes, “Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket?”. Also from a software architecture sense, one should strive to maintain separation between data, logic and presentation. What is to stop more web applications adopting this BYOS approach? As has already been outlined, its perfect for the developers, keeping the cost of launch down; and if its done in an open sense then its also a great choice for the developer.So, here is a call for anyone developing a web application which will contain a large quantity of user data - enable your users to store their data where they want, and either maintain that data in an open format, or provide code examples so that other application authors can get at that data.Its not been a good week for the web - on Thursday google mail was down for most of the day, also Digg and a few other sites also experienced outages. Is this the end of the world as we know it, or just a reminder that web applications seldom have 100% uptime and availability. This harks back to the article I wrote last year on Service Level Agreements in a Web 2.0 World, where I talk about the lack of any kind of service agreement in the current generation of web applications, and the consequences for those individuals or business which rely on them.Since that article, Google has made some steps around SLA’s within their Google Apps for Business and Education packages, which is good to see, by for the average user there is still a chance that outages and downtime can leave you without access to your data. But, is there a way round it?Interestingly, this week a company called Bandwagon unveiled an application which can backup your iTunes music library. The twist? It is based upon a concept labeled BYOS - Bring Your Own Storage. So, Bandwagon backs up your music to Amazon S3 (Amazon’s online pay-per-gb storage). If Bandwagon ceases to exist, all your music is safe on S3 and you can access it using a plethora of applications such as JungleDisk, which lets you mount S3 as a normal network drive. There are also plans allow users to backup their music to any FTP server, or other online storage solutions like OmniDisk.This is perfect for both Bandwagon, who no longer need to maintain the infrastructure and provide the bandwidth for their customers; and for the customer who is always in a position to access their music - even if they choose not to continue the Bandwagon service. So, why can’t this technique be applied to other applications?As the saying goes, “Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket?”. Also from a software architecture sense, one should strive to maintain separation between data, logic and presentation. What is to stop more web applications adopting this BYOS approach? As has already been outlined, its perfect for the developers, keeping the cost of launch down; and if its done in an open sense then its also a great choice for the developer.So, here is a call for anyone developing a web application which will contain a large quantity of user data - enable your users to store their data where they want, and either maintain that data in an open format, or provide code examples so that other application authors can get at that data.

Tags: gmail, google, sla

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