Amazon AWS – Small Bump In The Night
Amazon AWS service was down for close to 25 minutes last night . Based on their status page: http://status.aws.amazon.com/
7:39 PM PDT We are investigating connectivity issues for EC2 in the US-EAST-1 region.7:50 PM PDT We can verify connectivity issues between instances in the US-EAST-1 region and the Internet.8:03 PM PDT Full connectivity has been restored. The service is operating normally.
Some of the more recognized companies affected by the outage were Netflix, Foursquare and Reddit to name a few. The 25 minutes of downtime is a lot more forgiving than it was during the Spring outage in which some sites were down 2 days or more. This had created a swift gust of trepidation within many and rightfully so as 2 Days of lost revenue can be very crippling for some. These issues can certainly paralyze the public’s trust towards services such as Amazon and others.
One of our writers Sourya Biswas writes: 04,27, 2011
Lessons from the Amazon Cloud Outage
Unless you have been living under the proverbial rock (or maybe a tropical paradise with no Internet connectivity), you must have heard about one of the greatest disasters of the cloud computing industry – Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) outage that happened last week.
Now, mistakes are a part of life, more so in an emergent technology like cloud computing. In fact, history is strewn with quotes that advocate making mistakes as the first step towards excellence –
One common theme in all these quotes is “learning from mistakes.” In fact, that is a belief I have presented in earlier articles (See: What Effect Will the Epsilon Data Theft have on Cloud Computing? and Gmail Outage – Is Cloud Computing To Blame? ).
While the incidence of “mistakes” has risen somewhat recently, there’s no reason to “throw the baby with the bathwater” and abandon cloud computing. It would be better to learn a few things from this incident, such as:
- Understand what you are signing up for – This is very important for any customer of cloud computing. Clarify all the terms of the contract and if anything’s vague (a likely possibility in this brave new world of cloud computing), clear your doubts in writing. As of now, Amazon hasn’t declared the reason for the outage, unacceptable behavior in most business environments. Take steps to make providers accountable.
The bottom line is that Cloud Computing is still continuing to grow and develop. We need to have confidence in the fact that this is continuous work in progress and good if not great things do take time. In North America we are so use to ‘fast food communication’ with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. We want it and we want it NOW! However, in this case we’re just going to have to give it some time.
