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Amazon EC2 Crash Caused Data Loss
Relayman writes "Henry Blodget is reporting that the recent EC2 crash caused permanent data loss. Apparently, the backups that were being made were not sufficient to recover the lost data. Although a small percentage of the total data was lost, any data loss can be bad to a Website operator."
EC2 is not meant to be used for data storage, that is what S3 is designed for. You store data and backups on S3, and use EC2 to serve high bandwidth websites to the masses.
Cloud applications hosted on Amazon survived this incident without issue, as expected. Only the regular old hosted applications had problems with the outage. They were never "the cloud" to begin with, so I'm not sure why the term even comes up in this discussion.
The cloud represents a black box that hides the underlying network topology so that there are no single points of failure. Cloud applications are tolerant because they are spread through different datacenters across multiple points of in world. A catastrophe at one or more datacenters will have no noticeable effect on the availability of a cloud application because it continues to run in many more.
Amazon offers a few cloud applications: S3 comes to mind. But Amzon's EC2/EBS hosting service is a plain old hosting service like any other. The EC2 topology is not hidden away from you. You have to make active decisions about where you want your EC2 instance to live. That goes against the idea of the cloud. What Amazon does offer in EC2 is the tools necessary for you to build a cloud application, but not everything hosted on EC2 is a cloud application by default.
Post morten Amazon explanation:
http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/
Damia