Today’s EC2 outage took the IT sector and news media by storm. Many people have taken the opportunity to bash the concept of the public cloud and others outsourcing in general. It’s interesting though, some of Amazon’s most visible EC2 customers didn’t jump on the bandwagon, mimicking Quora’s sentiments:
“We’d point fingers, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without EC2.”
Shortly after this post, I received an email from one of Three Pillar‘s thought leaders, Mike, who has significant experience with the cloud. He pointed out another interesting aspect of this story:
What was not reported here was all the critical sites that stayed up because they properly engineered their application and operational deployment to take advantage of availability zones. High availability applications should distribute their load across multiple availability zones just in case there is a failure in one zone.
The cloud does not magically remove the need for good operations engineering.