All have uptime percentages. All have dependencies on third parties. The variables are what the uptime percentages are and how much control you have over them (e.g,. invest in a second leased line to deal with outages from the first carrier).

After all, when your service is down because the storage cloud has blown your bits to kingdom come, what are you going to tell your customer?

The same thing you’d tell your customer if your VPS provider had an outage. Or if your co-lo provider lost power and ran out of diesel. Or if somebody spilled coffee on your locally-installed server and caused it to flame out. In other words, having it in the “storage cloud” doesn’t change anything, except percentages and control.

(that said, amazon’s failure to provide a complete and thorough breakdown of the technical details leading up to the outage, and what specifically was done to resolve it, is totally unacceptable. Not providing your customers with that level of explanation, immediately, is worse (IMO) than the outage itself. After all, outages are a fact of life – nothing is 100%. However, there is NO excuse for failing to come clean about exactly what caused it, and what was done to resolve it.)

Today’s uproar re: the Amazon S3 outage takes me back to that funny moment when my daughter finally got my point – that I enabled her to enjoy the world of texting. And, like many AWS bloggers today, she did not appreciate that I gave her this gift.

So, to put a big picture perspective on today’s outage – most of us start ups, if not for AWS, would have burned thru our angle and round A funds to replicate AWS before we would have hit the tipping point and had the luxury of telling our customers that “we are experiencing an outage.”

Looking back on my old school days of expensive networks, users running out of storage and the constant flow of cash to admin staff, I must admit to having a soft spot for the AWS team and service. In those days, a two hour outage was considered an opportunity for our users to chat with the cube neighbor or go down to the cafeteria for a donut. Fast forward to today’s demanding customers and an outage of minutes starts Armageddon. Now, imagine if by some miracle, these customers actually pay for the start up’s service.

Today, I welcomed the outage as it reinforced my need for AWS. How would my small team respond to an outage? We don’t have the talented staff nor the passion the AWS team has. We forget that Amazon is in the small group of visionary “start-ups” who helped get the net to where we are today.

Phil Easter
CTO/AirMe

When my clients called to complain about their sites not working, I simply told them, “Amazon’s entire technical army is working as quickly as possible to resolve the issue and ensure that it doesn’t happen again. It may take a few hours to fix the problem, but they will find the problem and add additional checks to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.” I don’t have a single angry client.

I would’ve even said that to a “board of directors,” but if you get fired for a measly two hours of downtime, then they were looking for a reason to get rid of you anyway.