Slashdot Mirror
More Uptime Problems For Amazon Cloud
1sockchuck writes "An Amazon Web Services data center in northern Virginia lost power Friday night during an electrical storm, causing downtime for numerous customers — including Netflix, which uses an architecture designed to route around problems at a single availability zone. The same data center suffered a power outage two weeks ago and had connectivity problems earlier on Friday."
It seems that recently, anything can take down the cloud, or at least cause a serious disruption for any of the major cloud providers. I wonder how many more of these it takes before the cloud-skeptics start winning the debates with management a lot more often.
You can only argue that the extra costs and admin involved with cloud hosting outweigh the extra costs of self-hosting and paying competent IT staff for so long. If you read the various forums after an event like this, the mantra from cloud evangelists already seems to have changed from a general "cloud=reliable, and Google's/Amazon's/whoever's people are smarter than your in house people" to a much more weasel-worded "cloud is realiable as long as you've figured out exactly how to set it all up with proper redundancy etc." If you're going to pay people smart enough to figure that out, and you're not one of the few businesses whose model really does benefit disproportionately from the scalability at a certain stage in its development, why not save a fortune and host everything in-house?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So this is the second time this month Amazons cloud has gone down, there should be serious questions being asked of the sustainability of this service given the extremely poor uptime record and extremely large customer base.
They would have spent millions of dollars installing diesel or gas generators and/or battery banks and who knows how much money maintaining and testing it, but when it comes time to actually use it in an emergency, the entire system fails.
You would think having redundant power would be a fundamental crucial thing to get right in owning and operating a data centre, yet Amazon seems unable to handle this relatively easy task.
Now before people say "well this was a major storm system that killed 10 people, what do you expect", my response is that cloud computing is expected to do work for customers hundreds and thousands of kilometres/miles from the actual data centre so this is a somewhat crucial thing that we're talking about - millions of people literally depend on these services; that's my first point.
My second point is it's not like anything happened to the data centre, it simply lost mains energy. It's not like there was a fire, or flood, or the roof blew off the building, or anything like that; they simply lost power and failed to bring all their millions of dollars in equipment up to the task of picking up the load.
If I were a corporate customer, or even a regular consumer I would be seriously questioning the sustainability of at least Amazons cloud computing, Google and Facebook seem to be able to handle it but not Amazon - granted they don't offer identical products the overall data centres seem to stay up 100 or 99.9999999% of the time unlike Amazons.
That really shouldn't matter though as long as the Data center's generators are running and they can get fuel. It seems that they are not performing the proper testing and maintenance on their switchgear and generators if they are having this much trouble. The last time the data center in the building where I work went down for a power outage was when we had an arc flash in one of the UPS battery cabinets and they had to shut the data center (and the rest of the building's power for that matter) down.
sudo mod me up