If you are going to rely on cloud computing, make sure your vendor has a completely independent infrastructure set up to notify you when its cloud service fails. Google didn’t with its failure of its App Engine last week and as far as anyone knows, still doesn’t.

The System Status site is hosted separately from App Engine applications, and is not typically affected by availability problems. However, due to the
low level problem with GFS [Google File System] in this case, the System Status site was also affected.

Oops.