The Cloud Again Proves to be Single Point of Failure for Many
Third AWS Outage Since May Frustrates Technologists
Amazon Web Services suffered another outage on Friday, July 24th, as problems with the cloud provider’s US-West-2 region in Oregon led to significant issues for customers both large and small. It was the company’s third significant service interruption since May.
PlayStation, DoorDash, Apple Pay, Reddit, and Hulu were just a few of the organizations reported to suffer outages of varying lengths but the list of companies impacted always goes far deeper in such an event, as AWS has over 4 million customers. Even more companies are reliant upon AWS-based suppliers and service providers..
The service interruption was first reported at 6:40AM EDT by DownDetector users and AWS announced a full restoration of services at 11:14AM EDT. It took longer for some users to get back in track, particularly if they were supported by service providers and vendors navigating a broad range of AWS products and services.
We’re not looking to beat up on cloud providers, as much of what they do is quite impressive. AWS and their primary competitors have invested heavily in technology and talent, but they have very intricate networks and that complexity can lead to problems. The lack of visibility inherent in the shared services model of public cloud infrastructure can make it challenging for customers to evaluate and understand their experience, both in advance and when problems strike.
If your organization has a global reach, needs to support web traffic that is difficult to predict or surges seasonally, and has a talented, cloud-savvy technology team, the public cloud may be right for you. But part of success as a cloud customer involves effectively managing the financial risk of consumption-based pricing and weathering occasional outages. But for many enterprises their primary, core business applications will improve their uptime, perform better, and be more affordable in traditional data center infrastructure. Even 100% cloud-based enterprises may find some traditional data center resources invaluable for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes.
Whether the public cloud is right for you is examined in our Direct LTx white paper Cloud Challenges: Are Public Cloud Providers the Right Financial and Operational Fit for Your Business? which can be downloaded here. Or email us for a copy at strategy@DirectLTx.com.