I know several systems administrators who have spent a lot of sleepless nights dealing with SoftLayer networking outages over the last few months. Sure, the or

I know several systems administrators who have spent a lot of sleepless nights dealing with SoftLayer networking outages over the last few months. Sure, the original AWS sales pitch was a bit disingenuous, but it should be obvious to anyone with deployment experience that everything breaks all the time. It's not about the "quality" (by what metric?) brand IMO - it's about about evaluating a provider, understanding the failure modes, and choosing whether you're going to try to engineer around them, accept some downtime/customer-facing failure, or find a provider with failure modes you like better. This article is about picking AWS and understanding the EBS failure case, just like how if I picked SoftLayer I'd be trying to understand their network topology and power setup to see where failures might coordinate and try to understand what to do about it.