“Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy.”
Any good risk management tool is predicated around this mantra, and yet today, in a highly unusual incident, Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers’ went blank. Client sites from Foursquare to Reddit were rendered inaccessible Thursday, and there is no communication from AWS personnel as to why the system went down. I wonder how much revenue is being lost to AWS customers during the outage? A reading of the AWS contract terms will limit Amazon’s exposure liability, and undoubtedly raise the debate as to the reliability of placing data in the Clouds. More on this as the story develops.