Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work

Yes - but it's old versions that will no longer be updated. You can usually find older versions directly from resellers at Amazon at prices below Adobe's direct prices.

> Does it boil down to "single point of failure are bad"?

In the sense that "trust in a single entity as a single point of failure" - sure. Adobe can cut you off for any number of reasons, an outage being just one.

> When S3 is down, I don't remember seeing more than a few comments in the 'you should have self hosted your data' line .

One of those comments might have been mine. Still, I'm not saying that you should self-host, I'm saying you should use solutions that you could realistically self-host should the need arise.

So if you use s3 for your (non-web-related) data, maybe have riak-cs ready to go as a backup (it's a bit of a contrived example, because you probably either need a "cloud fs" of some sort, or mercurial/git or whatnot, not "s3" to be able to keep working).

I absolutely think one should have an alternative ready if one is heavily based on amazon -- at least have the option to spin up a minimal set of equivalent services as an openstack/nebula solution.

There are many reasons why you might get into trouble with any one provider, not just that their infrastructure goes down. If they hold all your data (and your backups) -- you pretty much have no leverage at all.

Vector data has a much smaller footprint in most cases, but takes lots of processing to render, and even more if you need to be able to zoom around the map. Rendering the US down to z17 as raster tiles allows for efficient processing, but could easily get into 10s of GB (which makes sense, since it is creating thousands and thousands of png images). The size grows exponentially with each zoom level though, so if you only need something like z12, you might be able get it into the 10s of MB range.

It is potentially relevant that Adobe are reportedly stopping selling traditional boxed versions of older CS versions in a few days, leaving CC the only option for new purchasers [but see edit below]. In the announcement, they claimed this was being done earlier than they had originally expected (implying in passing that they always intended to do this) and this was because CC had been so popular with their customers. However, they didn't seem to give any sort of data to back up that claim, which makes me rather skeptical about how much of this is driven by accounting and how much of it is driven by PR.

I agree CC is a sales experiment, and as both a user and a software developer it's an interesting one. I do wonder how much of any initial success has been a honeymoon period, though. Another interesting dichotomy was seeing that on the one hand there was a related statement from someone at Adobe about how customers had been worried that they would double their price once everyone is locked in but of course they'd never do that because it would be a betrayal of trust, while on the other hand anyone who signed up on the $30/month plan is about to hit the end of their first year's special offer and go up to the normal $50/month (but this is OK with Adobe because the offer was always advertised as limited up-front). That may all be true and legally above board, but I'm not sure how many people who did the maths at the $30 price point are still going to be as happy in their second year as they were in their first.

In other news, our existing installations of boxed CS products cost us nothing extra this month and didn't go down this week, and we're still waiting to meet either the client who we couldn't work with because we didn't have CC or the killer feature that Adobe have rolled out in a CC upgrade over the past year that would have made anything we do significantly more productive.

Ironically, there are plenty of ways Adobe could have got more money from us without going the subscription route. There are several features on our wish list that would have justified the cost of a traditional upgrade alone, even with no other changes. However, since Adobe don't seem to be going in any of those directions with CC, we're quite happy to exercise our choice not to pay them for the (worthless, to us) changes they are making instead.

Edit: It appears from other sources, including Adobe's own FAQ on their site, that CS6 will still be available to individual customers via download, just not in boxed media. It's the volume licensing programmes for perpetual purchases that are being discontinued on 30 May to push business and government users towards CC. There are some other interesting data points mentioned in this write-up:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/enterprise/387724/adobe-to-halt-...

Until CS6 stops being supported by some operating system or processor architecture in the future.