Amazon: a Single Disaster Made Us Rethink Our Cloud Supply Chain (datacenterfrontier.com)

1sockchuck writes: At this week's AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon Web Services introduced new features and looked ahead to a future in which enterprise computing shifts to the cloud. But AWS also looked back at how a disaster reshaped its supply chain. In 2011, an unusually heavy monsoon season led to massive flooding in Thailand, which at the time manufactured nearly half of the world's supply of hard disk drives (HDDs). Prices soared and shortages developed, and Amazon's usual vendors were unable to deliver the volume the company sought to support its fast-growing cloud computing platform. "When a single flood hits half the manufacturing supply, and you don't have a direct relationship with suppliers, it turns out to be hard to get what you need," said AWS executive Jerry Hunter. So AWS executives jumped on a plane, flew to Thailand, and began building direct relationships that would support their shift to company-built hardware.

Comments

And nothing changed

[guruevi]

So they flew to Thailand and cut out the middle man. Besides a small savings on their purchases, the next monsoon they'll still be without their drives. The problem wasn't that the distributors were piling up stocks, it's that they were physically unable to manufacture them.