Amazon Outage Demonstrates Need For Cloud Contingency

The Amazon outage over the weekend was localized and only affected some users, but those affected were irate. Paul Mah says SMBs must build contingencies, but that isolated outages are no reason to lose faith in cloud computing.

"Technical glitches plagued the popular Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service, starting from early Thursday morning and stretching into the Easter weekend. To be clear, the problem appears to be limited to Amazon's data center located in Northern Virginia; customers who host elsewhere or who make use of Amazon Web Services' redundant cloud architecture were not affected.

The distinction of this being a relatively localized problem is cutting no ice with customers who find their businesses affected, however. According to a New York Times report, smaller businesses and startups have been knocked offline. Network World reports that these same customers were left "very angry" and wanting to host a server in their own shop. What proved to be disconcerting to observers is the length of the outage – Amazon's entering into its fourth day of disruption at the time of this writing. As you would expect, the company has been accused of being cryptic about the cause of the outage and in failing to supply a definite time frame as to when its data center will be back in the green."