Nobody is shocked when they hear the teenager just learning to drive got into an accident. After all, even with the safest car on the block, the kid just lacks the depth of experience.

Maybe that’s the same growing pain we’re seeing from some of the recent outages at many major tech providers over the last few weeks. Maybe we simply lack the depth of experience? We think we know what to do but aren’t really prepared for situations that occur just 1% of the time.

Developing processes, buying hardware, staffing up, increasing complexity…. Making those significant investments just for something that just happens 1% of the time. Tough to get 20x return on that stuff. Tough to justify when the “accidents” just hurt you.

Now imagine that teenager is driving a bus full of people. Those 1% situations switch from potentially doing harm to just a few to endangering many. After all, they are providing a transportation platform for anyone willing to pay.

Isn’t this the same for our cloud providers that supply many others with platform-as-a-service? Now when Amazon or Google hits a rough patch, the thousands of others riding on their platforms get tossed around too.

I’m confident that our teenage drivers will get better. They will gain more experience, plan better, get help, and most importantly realize their actions (or lack of action) can and does impact others.

Let’s hope the leadership of the new guard for cloud computing are brave enough to fight for funding to take today’s platform offerings from ‘good enough’ to ‘great’ since we are all now getting on the bus.