Cloud providers have the means to keep their services available at all times, but have yet to deliver on this key expectation Verizon’s enterprise cloud will go offline for as long as two days starting Saturday, Jan. 10, at 1 a.m. ET for scheduled maintenance. Verizon is telling its customers that no further planned outages should occur around these upgrades. Based on the noise on Twitter, Verizon cloud users are not happy — nor should they be. Of course, planned outages are not only a Verizon issue. Amazon Web Services, IBM, Rackspace, and a few others had to bounce their servers over Xen hypervisor security issues in September 2014. Although I never expect 100 percent uptime, planned outages aren’t needed if the cloud platforms are designed correctly. It’s quite possible to do live migrations without a server reset these days, yet the cloud providers seem to be missing the boat here. Most of us who use the cloud need the services to be provided all the time. A key reason we use cloud services is to take advantage of a massive computing infrastructure that can work around any outages, without interruption. There’s no need to throw a hissy fit every time a cloud provider announces a scheduled outage, but the providers must offer a higher level of uptime than currently available. They need to figure out a way to work around — if not eliminate — any outage, planned or otherwise. As someone who’s built cloud services, I know this can be done. Indeed, Verizon’s weekend outage is meant to upgrade its cloud services, so they can work during scheduled maintenance. I suspect other public cloud providers are moving in the same direction. But they’re not there yet, and customers are rightfully upset that the cloud services aren’t delivering better-than-enterprise availability levels. There should be no cloud outages, ever. Got that? Cloud ComputingCareers