Outages of course happen and will happen for a while. The presence of independent cloud monitoring services who timely detected the outage is a good news. They will help to keep big cloud providers honest.
SearchCloudComputing.com:
Amazon outage caused by power failure during Virginia stormBy Carl Brooks, Technology Writer
09 Dec 2009 | SearchCloudComputing.com
Amazon Web Services had a power failure at its flagship data center in the wee hours of the morning today reporting connectivity issues and a power failure from about 4AM to 10AM Eastern Standard Time.
The cloud computing giant reported an "underlying power issue" that affected some instances in its US-EAST-1 availability zone. Amazon has 4 availability zones in the US, two on the east coast and two on the west.
The outage was irksome to users, but many gave Amazon points for better disclosure and fast response on the issue. Independent cloud monitoring services accurately reported the issue, a sign that public cloud services are gaining more traction.
CloudClimate.com, a site started by German software firm Paessler showed detailed timelines for the bobble, and networking monitoring firm Apparent Networks measured the outage more accurately than Amazon disclosed from multiple locations across the country at 44 minutes and 42 or 44 seconds, depending on location.""It shows up like a big hole" said Apparent's president, Jim Melvin. Apparent runs its own real-time 'Cloud Provider Scorecard' for the public. He said that his firm was an AWS user as well as providing monitoring software to customers for just this kind of occurrence. [Read more]
posted by: gqpartner
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