Apr 22 2011

Dark Clouds Over Amazon

Category: Cloud Computing — Teknovis @ 13:02

OK – I admit that the title of this blog post is a bit dramatic! I am of course referring to the fact that Amazon‘s cloud infrastructure was out for several hours yesterday. See Amazon fault takes down websites or Amazon cloud sinks, smothers Web 2.0 darlings.

It is a pity really, because this is the sort of incident that moving into the cloud is supposed to prevent! As somebody I know who deals with Amazon said:

Amazon keep promising us 100% reliability, because “Telcos’ five 9s are so yesterday”!

Yes – this has effected his companies cloud strategy!

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4 Responses to “Dark Clouds Over Amazon”

  1. Tibo says:
    April 24th, 2011 at 19:32

    I don’t understand your quote .. since when Telcos allow their customers’ websites to scale on demand (amongst other things…)

  2. Teknovis says:
    April 24th, 2011 at 19:57

    I am not sure I understand your question, but let me have a go …

    Telcos that offer Cloud services allow scaling on demand. Many telcos already offer Cloud services, and many more have offerings in the pipelines. I think that ultimately Telcos will be best positioned to offer complete, or end-to-end cloud services (see http://www.teknovis.eu/blog/2010/09/25/verizon-offers-cloud-computing-services/). Additionally, Telcos can offer many advantages within the PaaS environment. Think of integrated identification and authentication, policy, and charging services.

    The quote is from somebody in a Telco who is being courted by Amazon to move away from dedicated hardware in a dedicated data centre that offers 99.999% reliability. It was unlikely to happen before this incident, but I think that it certainly will not happen now!

  3. Tibo says:
    April 25th, 2011 at 08:08

    Just FYI: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/ -> 99.95%

  4. Tibo says:
    April 25th, 2011 at 08:16

    .. and believe it or not, I had never heard of the telcos offer :) Good luck to them, I don’t believe any of them will be immune to faults. I wonder if Verizon offers a 99.999% reliability for their service though

    > Yes – this has effected his companies cloud strategy!
    Good, maybe he’ll think twice before moving 100% of his architecture to the ‘cloud’