http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/networking/what-the-recent-amazon-web-services-outages-mean-in-our-own-cloud-journey/3910?tag=nl.e102

To say that it was difficult to miss the recent issues with certain Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-based services recently would be an understatement. Starting April 21, a number of AWS services had a series of service interruptions and performance issues. The most obvious indicator was that a number of social media services, which leverage cloud technology, were interrupted.

Before we start to jump to any conclusions, let’s zero in on what happened. Early on April 21, status reports started showing up on the AWS status console of issues with a number of services. The affected services were Amazon CloudWatch (N. Virginia), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) (N. Virginia), Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) (N. Virginia), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) (N. Virginia), AWS CloudFormation (N. Virginia),and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. As of the time that I am writing this blog (late Sunday night April 24), all services are back online except for a “limited number of customers” and each service is back to a green status with only a few notes.


   Surely there are bloggers and opinionated individuals enjoying the incident and shouting, “I told you so!” The fact is, if we don’t architect for domains of failure properly in our own datacenter, how are we going to do it in the public cloud?

What we have learned from this incident is that failures happen; how we change our behavior is a token to how well we learn from our mistakes – even if we weren’t impacted by this incident. What do you take of the AWS incident?