Lessons from the Amazon Crash

I had originally planned to blog on the innovative and environmentally friendly temperature control systems used by cloud computing service providers such as Amazon and Microsoft. These systems are extremely simple and unlike most in house data centres don't rely on traditional air conditioning systems.

However the recent Amazon outage and subsequent revelations have meant that my focus needs to be on a much more fundamental aspect of the services delivered by these data centres. The recent Amazon outage has rocked the confidence of existing and potential cloud computing users to the point that I believe businesses need to re-examine their cloud strategies and the business risks (in particular the business continuity risk) associated with them. Some Amazon customers effectively lost all their data as the email below which was sent to an Amazon customer highlights. There are several such emails circulating on the web currently so this doesn't appear to be an isolated occurrence.
Cloud computing promises and deliver much, however we should all learn from this in terms of taking nothing for granted in relation to cloud services even when from the big players such as Amazon. Ultimately the business risks still lies with the user and our cloud strategies and risk approach needs to take this into account.

Finally, while this was a serious incident that no doubt has set back cloud adoption in the short term I believe and hope that ultimately it will not derail the larger cloud computing movement.


"Hello,

A few days ago we sent you an email letting you know that we were
working on recovering an inconsistent data snapshot of one or more of
your Amazon EBS volumes. We are very sorry, but ultimately our efforts
to manually recover your volume were unsuccessful. The hardware failed
in such a way that we could not forensically restore the data.

What we were able to recover has been made available via a snapshot,
although the data is in such a state that it may have little to no
utility.

If you have no need for this snapshot, please delete it to avoid
incurring storage charges.

We apologize for this volume loss and any impact to your business.
Sincerely,
Amazon Web Services, EBS Support"