Slashdot Mirror
EC2 Outage Shows How Much the Net Relies On Amazon
An anonymous reader writes "Much has been written about the recent EC2/EBS outage, but Keir Thomas at PC World has a different take: it's shown how much cutting-edge Internet infrastructure relies on Amazon, and we should be grateful. Quoting: 'Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy, access to the means of distribution, and rapid evolution.'"
An article at O'Reilly comes to a similarly positive conclusion from a different angle.
This article seems to be an apology for Amazon.
Basicly it says "We went down, and took down lots of important stuff. That shows just how important we are and that lots of people use us. Thus, our cloud is a good thing."
The logic of that doesn't quite work.
I agree that it's a useful tool, but there are a lot of things that don't make sense to put in the cloud.
The cloud represents a black box that abstracts the underlying network topology.
You might send your data to a server in Germany and retrieve it from a server in the USA. When you put something in the cloud you do not have to worry about problems like this because the cloud provider already has a hot backup ready to take the slack in another part of the world. You don't need to know or care how it happens, it just works. S3 is an Amazon example of a cloud service. You send your file to S3 and Amazon takes the responsibility of ensuring that it is available even if a datacenter is blown to smithereens.
EC2 and EBS are not the cloud. There is no abstraction of the datacenter. Amazon leaves it up to you to choose which datacenter you wish to work in. This can allow you to easily build a cloud application on top of their physical infrastructure, but it is up to you to make it "the cloud". We witnessed so many failures because the applications were not cloud applications, just standard hosted services.
Microsoft: We're sorry our product broke and a lot of people weren't able to get online. Slashdot: BURN THE HERETIC! Amazon: We're sorry our product broke and a lot of people weren't able to get online. Slashdot: It's okay. Here, have a cookie.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Paying for multiple availability zones is not the same as paying for multiple locations. There are multiple availability zones in a single datacenter. Netflix got it right, they spread their infrastructure over multiple physical locations, and didn't suffer any downtime despite losing a significant chunk of their infrastructure; it was business as usual.
Like anything else, cloud computing still requires you to decide how much redundancy you're willing to pay for. If uptime is that important to you, spreading your infrastructure out over multiple datacenters is a no-brainer.
Don't forget the one-click patent. True democracy/spirit of the Internet my ass.