Yesterday’s global Cloudflare outage brings up some interesting DAM/CMS/database questions and I want to talk about it. Earlier in October we saw a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage (a lot of DAM/CMS’ use AWS for deep storage). And now Cloudflare, which is a network security suite of tools for internet service providers, went down. Like AWS, Cloudflare is part of the underlying tech to the data systems we use for asset/content management.
Different DAMS/CMS’ say they’re different from other vendors by arguing they give different features/systems or targeting metadata standards for a specific sector. But this an illusion of choice. Most products will rely on the exact same underlying cloud technologies like AWS, Cloudflare, or SSL. The vendor we choose is really giving us front-end features (e.g. drag-and-drop file upload, list making) that may or not may not hold up when we export our data. The underlying tech to a system is more important during data migrations.
Many places use hosted options and therefore these technologies for reasons like lack of budget/funding or they lack in-house staff. The illusion of choice is important because there’s continued interest in cloud-based systems, which makes us all susceptible/over-reliant on tech that DAMS/CMS vendor has no control over.
- What other ways do DAMS/CMS/databases give us the illusion of choice?
- Why did we collectively decide to move to cloud-based systems?
- What do we do now that we know the cost (outages disrupt global life!)?