I almost couldn't believe this when I saw the article. The Verizon Cloud is shutting down for 48 hours. Apparently they have maintenance scheduled for this weekend and notified their customers that their virtual machines will be shut down. There are some legacy Verizon cloud-type services that will be available, but the platform they've been pushing to customers will be down.

This isn't good news for Verizon or their customers, but it also doesn't help the cloud overall as a service. It reinforces the idea that reliability isn't necessarily better for vendors than individuals. If costs are anywhere near each other, this would certainly make me think twice about moving anything really important in my organization to a single cloud vendor.

I suspect that most cloud vendors have outages like this, but they don't shut down their entire clouds. With a large amount of maintenance at a data center, they'll migrate customers to a separate data center or other part of their cloud while they perform their work. Either this is a major change to their entire infrastructure that can't be staged on just a part of their system, or they've poorly planned their maintenance.

Either way, this will certainly be a good DR test for enterprises that might have important applications hosted with Verizon. It will also be a chance to test how you notify your customers of potential issues or deal with them. I wouldn't want to have an application hosted here as it would be a lot of work for me and a weekend away from family, but I know I'd learn a lot about how well I've prepared my own systems for fault tolerance.