Amazon EC2 Cloud Services Crash

Security and reliability have continued to be the two biggest concerns for companies contemplating a move “to the cloud,” and the recent very high-profile crash of Amazon’s EC2 cloud services are bound to make cloud-shy businesses even more wary, even as technology leaders such as Microsoft and Google push for more and more “cloudification” of IT.

The crash took down the web sites of many companies, some of them well known such as Reddit, Quora and Box. Some sites were down for hours, others for days. Here’s an account of what happened and how the contingency plan that Amazon had in place, which was supposed to prevent an outage in one zone from affecting others, didn’t work:

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-outage-enters-its-second-day-lots-of-sites-still-down-2011-4

No one has yet reported on how much money was likely lost due to the web outages, but now it appears the incident was even worse than that – some (albeit a relatively small amount) of customers’ data was permanently lost. The company sent letters to notify the affected customers that efforts to recover their data had been unsuccessful. Ouch. Somehow “We apologize for this loss” seems like small consolation.

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-lost-data-2011-4

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