Major Outage At the Amazon Web Services

ralphart writes "The Northern Virginia datacenter for Amazon Web Services appears to be having a major outage that affects EC2 services. The Amazon Forums are full of reports of problems. Latest update from the status page: 2:49 AM PDT We are continuing to see connectivity errors impacting EC2 instances, increased latencies impacting EBS volumes in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region, and increased error rates affecting EBS CreateVolume API calls. We are also experiencing delayed launches for EBS backed EC2 instances in affected availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. We continue to work towards resolution."

Comments

Re:Emergency Plan

[MariusBoo]

Actually in the case of EC2 the smart thing would have been to have your instances spread over different availability zones...

Re:No Way!

[lgw]

his will become quite the event in data warehouse circles I bet, because the cost of 'being in the cloud' just doubled; it's not enough to buy storage from one provider. The "always there" quality that's supposedly the benefit of cloud storage is a facade.

The cloud doesn't have to be perfect - it just has to be as good in the eyes of VPs as the contractors they'd otherwise hire to run their internal datacenter. What's the value of an IT guy in the eyes of an MBA? Yeah, this sort of reality check wont phase them at all.