Web Business by Ken Burbary

I’ve been closely following Amazon’s progress with AWS, Amazon Web Services, for some time now. Many of the services they offer, the Simple Storage Service in particular, have grown rapidly as a popular choice for many web startups and companies seeking a cheaper storage alternative to their own datacenters. In fact, some colleagues of mine have moved forward with putting their entire technology platform inside the Amazon computing cloud.

All of the momentum behind Amazon S3 came to a screeching halt today when customers experienced a service failure that lasted for 2 hours.

Many Amazon customers and technologists through the blogosphere have reacted with outrage and harsh criticism of Amazon over the issue. While it is certainly disruptive and unfortunate, the risk of an outage like this is one of the trade-offs you take on with the benefits of using S3. As of this writing, Amazon’s S3 SLA only guarantees 99.9% uptime. That, coupled with the fact that commercial cloud computing on this scale is still in its infancy almost sets the stage for these issues.

That said, I don’t believe this will be anything more than a temporary black eye to Amazon. They will continue to improve, innovate and optimize the service reliability. Adding monitoring tools and providing visibility into the system’s health data will probably also come.

Are you using any of Amazon Web Services? Would this recent service failure deter you from using them? Send me your thoughts.