Ouch. I am not glad to see this one. You’ve heard of it by now: Amazon’s cloud services collapse.
And oh yes, I’ve been recommending this kind of service to my clients. Fortunately, they chose Rackspace. Knock on wood….
You can watch the digital history of the event from its beginnings. See “Amazon Server Troubles Take Down Reddit, Foursquare & HootSuite” at Mashable.com: http://mashable.com/2011/04/21/amazon-aws-server-problems/,
then follow to “AWS is down: Why the sky is falling” at http://justinsb.posterous.com/aws-down-why-the-sky-is-falling for a little technical discussion.
Next take the trail to CNN: “Learning from Amazon’s cloud collapse” at http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/04/22/amazon.cloud.mashable/index.html?hpt=Sbin
Executive Summary: This cloud stuff is in its infancy. There are going to be some (painful) teething pains. Don’t bet your career on this stuff yet, but be a cautious entrant to the game, not a bystander. Ironically, one of the best ways to do this is a free trial of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.
[UPDATE:
“As technical problems interrupted computer services provided by Amazon for a second day on Friday, industry analysts said the troubles would prompt many companies to reconsider relying on remote computers beyond their control….
…The Amazon interruption … was the computing equivalent of an airplane crash. It is a major episode with widespread damage. But airline travel … is still safer than traveling in a car — analogous to cloud computing being safer than data centers run by individual companies.”
– Amazon’s Trouble Raises Cloud Computing Doubts, at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/technology/23cloud.html?_r=2
]