At some level, I can agree with this sentiment. You don't know where the servers are, you can't see the cables, and a lot of things are just plainly out of your

At some level, I can agree with this sentiment. You don't know where the servers are, you can't see the cables, and a lot of things are just plainly out of your control. TL;DR: AWS can realistically provide high-enough availability for most; but I think the article makes good points for those looking to get deep into the nines. However, I think the real issue is that while you can make fairly HA systems on AWS, it quickly gets expensive. A huge pull for AWS (IMO) is how cheap it is for an org to spin up four or five servers of various specs, and keep them running or shut them down. In order to achieve some aspect of HA through AWS, you need to mirror your entire setup in three places (not to mention some archives in S3, and ideally some archives on non-AWS). The cost savings start to quickly degrade as you configure your AWS-hosted system for real HA (or real close to HA). IMO, many of the organizations that use AWS are in a position where they probably wouldn't have true HA configured if they were using VPS or physical hardware, so it's not so much of a concern. For the larger organizations who have more funds and more dedicated Ops employees, we've only seen a couple of issues that should have affected availability, and usually availability drops because they cut corners. Granted - at least two of the recent outages showed errors on the AWS-side, and decisions that Ops made for AWS regions/AZs should have been fine, but weren't. That in mind, any HA sysadmins out there would have shuttered to think of relying on two different mechanisms that were potentially in the same data center (that is, backup servers or load balanced servers in the same region).