Now that the dust has settled on the Amazon EC2 cloud outage, the company is offering an apology and a credit for its role in making many popular web sites, like FourSquare, Twitter, and Netflix, unavailable.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) customers in regions affected at the time of the disruption, regardless of whether their resources and application were impacted or not, are getting an automatic 10-day credit equal to 100 percent of their usage.
“We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses and we will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services,” Amazon said in a statement. “As with any significant operational issue, we will spend many hours over the coming days and weeks improving our understanding of the details of the various parts of this event and determining how to make changes to improve our services and processes.”
Most anyone familiar with data center operations could sympathize with Amazon — outages, even severe outages, happen, and companies are usually judged according to how quickly they respond to the problem and whether they are able to prevent similar events from occurring again, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund IT.
However, he added, while Amazon’s cloud services are generally well regarded, patience among affected companies and their clients wore thin as the days stretched on. That was hardly surprising, he said, but it created the opportunity to consider exactly how organizations have been leveraging the EC2 cloud, and how well they’ve been doing it.
“Some, including Netflix and SmugMug, were hardly affected at all, largely because they had designed their environments for high availability — in line with Amazon’s guidelines — using EC2 as merely one of several IT resources,” King said. “On the other…
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