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"Today’s incident also shows the fragility of the 'cloud' as it can be knocked out a single lightening strike." How is this different from any other data cente

"Today’s incident also shows the fragility of the 'cloud' as it can be knocked out a single lightening strike." How is this different from any other data center? Note too that on EC2, your instances will be spread randomly throughout the facility - you'd actually be better off having this happen on EC2 vs. in a traditional DC. Furthermore, this was a localized incident inside of a single availability zone - the other four (now five, actually) AZs were completely unaffected. The author clearly does not know what he is talking about. I'm glad one commenter on the article had the sense to call him out. Too bad he was followed by the usual set of trolls.

mdasen 17y ago
From what I've heard, this is EC2's only outage in the past year. Amazon's SLA guarantees 99.95% availability for a region (meaning that if you have 2 instances running in different availability zones, Amazon guarantees that at least one of the instances will be up 99.95% of the time). However, with a 3 hour downtime being their only downtime (so far as I'm aware) in the past year, they're hitting 99.95% uptime within an availability zone. It should be noted that the 365 Main datacenter that hosts (hosted?) Craigslist, Six Apart, Technorati, and a number of high profile web companies had a total failure a while back (http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/365-main-datace.html http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/365-main-datace.ht...). Similarly, Rackspace (whose business is not having to worry about your servers) had 3 outages in 2 days (http://gawker.com/tech/followup/rackspace-outage-was-third-in-two-days-321909.php http://gawker.com/tech/followup/rackspace-outage-was-third-i...). So, Amazon's 3 hour outage that affected a minority of their customers doesn't seem that outrageous. You're totally right. The author was probably writing a bit of link-bait to get read. No one reads "Amazon EC2 has minor outage that compares favorably against their competitors and affected a minority of their customers." That's just business-as-usual talk. However, if you question the entire viability of cloud computing because of a 3 hour outage, well, that deserves reading.
tybris 17y ago
I'm not sure what they're comparing against. They can't possibly claim that corporate infrastructure has better availability. If a server breaks in your office it takes hours to replace. If a server breaks in EC2 it takes seconds to launch a new one.

mdasen 17y ago

From what I've heard, this is EC2's only outage in the past year. Amazon's SLA guarantees 99.95% availability for a region (meaning that if you have 2 instances running in different availability zones, Amazon guarantees that at least one of the instances will be up 99.95% of the time). However, with a 3 hour downtime being their only downtime (so far as I'm aware) in the past year, they're hitting 99.95% uptime within an availability zone. It should be noted that the 365 Main datacenter that hosts (hosted?) Craigslist, Six Apart, Technorati, and a number of high profile web companies had a total failure a while back (http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/365-main-datace.html http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/365-main-datace.ht...). Similarly, Rackspace (whose business is not having to worry about your servers) had 3 outages in 2 days (http://gawker.com/tech/followup/rackspace-outage-was-third-in-two-days-321909.php http://gawker.com/tech/followup/rackspace-outage-was-third-i...). So, Amazon's 3 hour outage that affected a minority of their customers doesn't seem that outrageous. You're totally right. The author was probably writing a bit of link-bait to get read. No one reads "Amazon EC2 has minor outage that compares favorably against their competitors and affected a minority of their customers." That's just business-as-usual talk. However, if you question the entire viability of cloud computing because of a 3 hour outage, well, that deserves reading.

tybris 17y ago

I'm not sure what they're comparing against. They can't possibly claim that corporate infrastructure has better availability. If a server breaks in your office it takes hours to replace. If a server breaks in EC2 it takes seconds to launch a new one.