Amazon Cloud Outage Lesson: Pilot Error?
- Mike Barton
- posted in Blog, Featured ⋅ June 15, 2012 1:36 pm
While IT vendors and the private cloud folks are sure to seize upon Amazon’s cloud outage late Thursday, it’s important to remember that power outages — like massive snowstorms and hurricanes — happen, so smart cloud adopters should take this as a lesson to spread workloads across data center locations.
But that lesson will not take away from the cloud of doubt cast over such services, especially when the one on a roll — and recently looking to build its enterprise cred with free basic support and improved premium support — takes a lump.
GigaOm’s Barb Darrow, in her post Will Amazon outage ding cloud confidence?, writes:
Outages like this, which first showed up on the Amazon Web Service dashboard at 8:50 p.m. Pacific time and was declared resolved at 3:26 a.m. Pacific time, draw lots of headlines and posturing — cloud competitors leaped onto Twitter to state that their sites were up and running — but cloud experts warned against over reaction.
This is a tempest in a teapot, said Carl Brooks, analyst at Tier1 Research. “AWS outages are still magnified out of proportion to their severity. It doesn’t help their credibility with the paleoconservative enterprise paranoid who will use this as an excuse to buy more absurdly overpriced IT from the usual suspects.”
In other words, take a deep breath. And make sure you design your AWS workloads to run across geographies.
Have your say: The message here is, don’t blame on the cloud what you could have avoided — it’s pilot error. But is the location of data centers something you should have to plan around, or is it something Amazon should do as part of its service?