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This post happens about once a week on the Amazon forums. I've watched it play out dozens of times on the S3 and Cloudfront forums too, and every single time i

This post happens about once a week on the Amazon forums. I've watched it play out dozens of times on the S3 and Cloudfront forums too, and every single time it turns out to be operator error. In this case, the guy didn't realize he needed to take snapshots of his volumes. It's not surprising, really, since the documentation isn't so great for AWS, and it's probably even more painful knowing that it would have been a single button click to back up his volume using Amazon's tools. But in the end, there's nothing to see here. Just like the guy who wakes up in the morning to find all his S3 files mysteriously gone (after he 'renamed' his bucked the previous night by dropping and recreating it), it always turns out to be the user shooting himself in the foot. And in the cases when Amazon actually does something wrong, they're always on top of it immediately and back with a public explanation within hours. (from my experience)

wmf 17y ago
OTOH, if operators keep making the same mistake over and over again, maybe the UI should be changed. I think there's a fundamental mismatch in the EC2 control panel because it looks like anyone should be able to use it, but you have to be a competent sysadmin to use it safely.
- wmf 17y ago
  Reuven Cohen makes a more detailed version of this point: "[Amazon] expect a certain level of knowledge of both system administration as well as how AWS itself has been designed to be used. Newbies need not apply or should use at you're own risk. Which isn't all that clear to a new user, who hears that cloud computing is safe and the answer to all your problems. ... You need the late adopters for the real revenue opportunities, but these same late adopters require a different more gentle kind of cloud service... As IaaS matures it is becoming obvious that the "Über Geek" developers who first adopted the service is not where the long tail revenue opportunities are." http://www.elasticvapor.com/2010/05/failure-as-service.html http://www.elasticvapor.com/2010/05/failure-as-service.html

wmf 17y ago

OTOH, if operators keep making the same mistake over and over again, maybe the UI should be changed. I think there's a fundamental mismatch in the EC2 control panel because it looks like anyone should be able to use it, but you have to be a competent sysadmin to use it safely.

wmf 17y ago
Reuven Cohen makes a more detailed version of this point: "[Amazon] expect a certain level of knowledge of both system administration as well as how AWS itself has been designed to be used. Newbies need not apply or should use at you're own risk. Which isn't all that clear to a new user, who hears that cloud computing is safe and the answer to all your problems. ... You need the late adopters for the real revenue opportunities, but these same late adopters require a different more gentle kind of cloud service... As IaaS matures it is becoming obvious that the "Über Geek" developers who first adopted the service is not where the long tail revenue opportunities are." http://www.elasticvapor.com/2010/05/failure-as-service.html http://www.elasticvapor.com/2010/05/failure-as-service.html