By now you have heard that Amazon Web Services had a massive disruption yesterday, affecting EC2 instances in their northern Virginia data center. The disruption was/is long lived (Amazon’s dashboard is still showing problems) and certainly blew any claims for an annual uptime of 99.9 percent, which is 8.76 hours downtime per year and likely blew 99.8 percent uptime which is 17.52 hours of downtime. While 99.8 percent sounds good, the fact that some sites have been down the better part of a day has real impact on revenue. The downtime is also bad for those who manage Amazon’s Web Services. It’s bad for those that use Amazons web services. No one likes downtime. But it’s not necessarily a reason to avoid the cloud, and don’t make the mistake of thinking that owning your own infrastructure would have avoided a similar problem.
Network Computing