Don’t just blame the cloud for the Amazon Web Services outage

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Ted Samson.

Amazon Web Services has once again found itself in the unenviable position of being the poster-boy-turned-whipping-boy for the cloud computing world due to another high-profile service disruption that severely slowed down or knocked out a handful of heavily trafficked websites and services, including Netflix, Reddit, Airbnb, imgur, Pinterest, Heroku, and Foursquare. Like clockwork, the outage has generated a healthy debate around the blogosphere as to whether this most recent downtime spells doom for the cloud in general or for Amazon in particular, or whether affected AWS users accept a share of the blame for taking the cheap route and signing up for the bare-bones, single-region AWS services to host their mission-critical services.

AWS confirmed on its status page at 11:11 p.m. PT yesterday that it had experienced "degraded performance for a small number of EBS (Elastic Beanstalk Service) volumes." The page said that the issue was restricted to a single Availability Zone within the U.S.-East-1 Region, which is in Northern Virginia…

If that region rings a bell, it’s because it was at the center of the significant AWS outages earlier this year: The facility suffered an outage in June — purportedly caused by a line of powerful thunderstorms but also some bugginess — that disrupted services, including Elastic Compute, Elastic Cache, Elastic MapReduce, and Relational Database Services. A previous Amazon Web Services outage occurred in the same facility on June 14…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/dont-just-blame-the-cloud-the-amazon-web-services-outage-205537