15 February 2008 - 6:40pm, Phil Easter (not verified) said:
Last summer my 15 year old greeted me - “Dad! My cell phone is broke and I can’t text my friends!” “mmm.. this is serious. What did you use to do before I bought you the phone?” “I wasn’t able to text back then, dah!!”
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.
Dad, my cell phone broke!
Last summer my 15 year old greeted me - “Dad! My cell phone is broke and I can’t text my friends!” “mmm.. this is serious. What did you use to do before I bought you the phone?” “I wasn’t able to text back then, dah!!”
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