Cloud Computing: Why Amazon customers might think twice about going east
October 23, 2012
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.
Why do tech-savvy companies like Heroku, Pinterest, AirBNB, Instagram, Reddit, Flipboard, and FourSquare keep so much of their computing horsepower running on Amazon’s aging US-East infrastructure given its problematic track record? US-East experienced big problems again Monday, impacting those sites and more. The latest snafu comes after other outages in June and earlier.
Why they’re sticking with US-East — especially since Amazon itself preaches distribution of loads across availability zones and geographic regions — is the multimillion dollar question that no one at these companies is addressing publicly. But there are pretty safe bets as to their reasons. For one thing, Ashburn, VA-based US-East came online in 2006 and is Amazon’s oldest and biggest data center (or set of data centers).That’s why lot of big, legacy accounts run there. Moving applications and workloads is complicated and expensive given data transfer fees. Face it, inertia hits us all — take a look at your own closets and you’ll probably agree. Moving is just not easy. Or fun…
Data gravity is one issue. “If you’ve been in US-East for a while, chances are you’ve built up a substantial amount of data in that region. It’s not always easy to move data around depending on how the applications are constructed,” said an industry exec who’s put a lot of workloads in Amazon and did not want to be identified…
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/why-amazon-customers-might-think-twice-about-going-east/