AWS Sydney’s outage shows the value of a walk in the cloud

June 9, 2016 Off By David

Grazed from The Register. Author: Simon Sharwood.

To understand the lessons of this week’s Amazon Web Services outage in Sydney, which took down the local AWS cloud for a few hours, take a walk down Huntley Street, Alexandria, an unlovely street in a light industrial suburb. Huntley Street is interesting because its footpaths are riddled with an unusual concentration of telecoms duct covers that hide the wires and fibres bringing data into the Equinix data centre around the corner.

Another feature of Huntley Street is a bridge, currently under repairs, over a stormwater drain that feeds into a waterway called the Alexandria Canal. The Canal is at sea level, so Huntley Street is maybe a meter or two above the water. It’s almost certainly below the hundred-year flood line. When Equinix opened the data centre it knew about the canal and the hundred-year line, because it told us servers there are all five metres off the ground so they don’t get wet in a really big wet…

The telecoms ducts don’t have that luxury: they have to go down and under Huntley Street…

Read more from the source @ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/08/aws_sydneys_cloud_outage_shows_the_value_of_a_walk_in_the_cloud/