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

Monsoon season affecting The Cloud?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems ironic.

Re:Once again no editing

[crow]

Well, being Slashdot, people will use the initialism in their comments, and others will ask what it means, so having it spelled out isn't a problem. It's much better than the summaries that use an initialism without explaining it. There have been many that did that, often with much more obscure references.

Of course, the real answer is that in most cases the summaries are cut-and-paste copies from the article.

Intel

[PRMan]

I looked at the time, and Intel lost so much money on CPUs and motherboards that they would have been better off upgrading people to SSDs for free.

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.

Re:And nothing changed

[luis_a_espinal]

You'd think the market would have responded with more .22LR ammo, but it hasn't. It suggests something more sinister than Obama's agenda, which was the original reason given for the run on ammo. I think ammo manufacturers have taken a lesson from Enron and gasoline refiners in California and engineered themselves a little shortage to drive up prices.

Me no think so. I think it is emotion-driven demand that constantly clears up the aisles off any box with 22LR (and to a lesser degree, 38SP, regular load or +P). For as much as guns are popular in this country, we have a shitty supply-chain. To make it worse, you cannot easily reload 22LR, which makes scarcity even worse. With almost every other ammo, you can reload your own (either as a hobby, to weather shortages or, if you are a crazy lunatic, preparing for the Obama/UN/Jade Helm apocalypse.)

With 22LR, there is no reloading option, so your only option is to grab what you can and stockpile. And every other 22LR afficionado (or crazy lunatic) has the same idea. It's been months that I've seen a 22LR box in Walmart, for example. Crazy!