Online retail giant Amazon Inc. has experienced an outage of its Web-hosting and cloud-computing platform Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service (RDS).
It was reported that only the East Coast of the United States was affected by the outage, in particular Amazon’s data center close to Dulles Airport on the outskirts of Washington.
Late last week, websites such as Foursquare, Reddit, and Quora were not available due a disruption to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) division.
The company has issued an apology in response to the situation on its website: “We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses and we will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services. … [The company will] spend many hours over the coming days and weeks improving our understanding of the details of the various parts of this event and determining how to make changes to improve our services and processes.”
The popularity of companies opting for remote storage of data online rather than on their own computers is ever increasing. This instance highlights the risks associated with such “renting” of virtual storage of information.
As Amazon’s cloud-computing facilities were linked to the back-end of several popular websites, the home pages of such websites were also unavailable. Amazon basically rents out computer time and storage space to companies. This business area is still being developed and is not a core part of Amazon’s operations, but its long-term vision is apparent.
As compensation, AWS has offered a 10-day service credit to all subscribers of its service, irrespective of whether their operations were impacted or not.
This occurrence has resurrected the stability and sustainability of the Amazon’s virtual Internet support, and Amazon customers have responded to the outage. One customer said, “Given a choice between hosting servers on AWS and trying to build my own reliable infrastructure with a single sysadmin, I’ll take AWS in a heartbeat.”
On a blog post last Firday, Gartner Research Vice President Andrea Di Maio commented that the disruption puts a spotlight on the inadequacy of Amazon’s virtual product. “While it is important to maintain pressure on service providers to improve their reliability footprint, the onus of developing or contracting reliable system stays with their clients, and there won’t be any miraculous cloud that provides 100 percent up-time or that does not risk to fail meeting its own SLAs,” she noted.
It was reported that only the East Coast of the United States was affected by the outage, in particular Amazon’s data center close to Dulles Airport on the outskirts of Washington.
Late last week, websites such as Foursquare, Reddit, and Quora were not available due a disruption to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) division.
The company has issued an apology in response to the situation on its website: “We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses and we will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services. … [The company will] spend many hours over the coming days and weeks improving our understanding of the details of the various parts of this event and determining how to make changes to improve our services and processes.”
The popularity of companies opting for remote storage of data online rather than on their own computers is ever increasing. This instance highlights the risks associated with such “renting” of virtual storage of information.
As Amazon’s cloud-computing facilities were linked to the back-end of several popular websites, the home pages of such websites were also unavailable. Amazon basically rents out computer time and storage space to companies. This business area is still being developed and is not a core part of Amazon’s operations, but its long-term vision is apparent.
As compensation, AWS has offered a 10-day service credit to all subscribers of its service, irrespective of whether their operations were impacted or not.
This occurrence has resurrected the stability and sustainability of the Amazon’s virtual Internet support, and Amazon customers have responded to the outage. One customer said, “Given a choice between hosting servers on AWS and trying to build my own reliable infrastructure with a single sysadmin, I’ll take AWS in a heartbeat.”
On a blog post last Firday, Gartner Research Vice President Andrea Di Maio commented that the disruption puts a spotlight on the inadequacy of Amazon’s virtual product. “While it is important to maintain pressure on service providers to improve their reliability footprint, the onus of developing or contracting reliable system stays with their clients, and there won’t be any miraculous cloud that provides 100 percent up-time or that does not risk to fail meeting its own SLAs,” she noted.
