Just like internal IT, cloud providers will have occasional 'unscheduled downtime' -- so what? In a recent post, I put forth the prediction that in 2010 we’ll see a few major cloud failures, as cloud computing providers continue to support a larger and larger processing load. Just last week, Amazon Web Services had a 44-minute outage in part of its Northern Virginia datacenter. This was attributed to the failure of a power supply in the “availability zone” in the datacenter and to a second failure of a component in the redundant system, as reported by Charles Babcock at InformationWeek. This outage was not surprising.What was surprising was the reaction — or should I say overreaction? — around this outage. Specfically Steven Burke of ChannelWeb, who stated, “The Amazon Web Services disclosure reveals the dangers and pitfalls for corporations moving to the cloud. Zero downtime is the standard for corporate America today. Amazon Web Services dropped the ball big time. The EC2 failure is going to stick in the craw of any CEO or CIO looking to cut internal IT costs by moving to the cloud.”Where did that come from? It went down for 44 minutes in a regional datacenter. Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to cast the first stone when cloud computing providers go down due to bad architectural decisions, incompetence, or both. However, the fact of the matter is that cloud computing providers, especially specific datacenters, will go down from time to time. I agree that “zero downtime” should be the standard, but those of you who are reading this blog can perhaps think of a few times in the last few months when your internal corporate systems had “an unscheduled outage,” which is politically correct speak for “we went down.”Amazon.com is not alone. InfoWorld reported that Rackspace had experienced several outages in the late summer, and I suspect a few outages haven’t made the press. Moreover, SaaS clouds have had many outages in the past, and for some reason their customers remain in business.Get a grip: Cloud computing providers will go down from time to time, like existing internal systems. However, I suspect that the uptime metrics for most cloud computing providers will be superior to most existing internal corporate systems, when all is said and done. Let’s not panic. This article, “Beware ‘the sky is falling!’ panic in the cloud,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in cloud computing at InfoWorld.com. Cloud Computing