Saturday, February 16, 2008

Amazon Web Services went down

Amazon Web Services that provide web-scale computing infrastructure to many other companies were down over 30 minutes yesterday morning. A number of websites that depend on Amazon's S3 storage, and EC2 compute cloud were affected. Eric Schonfeld(TechCrunch) comments on the reliability of cloud computing business:
"Nobody is going to trust their business to cloud computing unless it is more reliable than the data-center computing that is the current norm. So many Websites now rely on Amazon’s S3 storage service and, increasingly, on its EC2 compute cloud as well, that an outage takes down a lot of sites, or at least takes down some of their functionality. Cloud computing needs to be 99.999 percent reliable if Amazon and others want it to become more widely adopted."
This raises an issue related with usage of storage services like S3, one should never build architecture that requires high availability access of such a service. Further, it's a warning signal to such storage service providers to incorporate architecture with no single point of failure.

3 comments:

Kishor said...

This is an interesting example of how one site can affect lot of other sites out there. What excuse should the customers be given if this happens? It wasn't your fault but they don't care whose fault it was.

Audumbar said...

"It wasn't your fault but they don't care whose fault it was."
I didn't get that completely, please explain.

Kishor said...

I mean if your site is using Amazon's services and Amazon goes down, what do you tell YOUR customers?