• Shaival S Trivedi
• Entrepreneurs
• April 26, 2011

The Amazon Cloudburst

by Shaival S Trivedi

What do Reddit, HootSuite, Quora, Foursquare among many others have in common? They were all victims of the Amazon Cloudburst which took place last week rendering the complete outage of the above services for a few hours. This resulted in a massive loss in productivity and business opportunity for these businesses that have rented Amazon’s cloud computing services to store and showcase massive amount of content. Amazon, the world’s largest online shopping store, launched its cloud computing business in 2006 on a pay per consumption model. Amazon Web Services provides inexpensive, customizable and scalable data hosting services to scores of clients who otherwise would have found it difficult to internally host their data on their own servers because of the exorbitant costs involved. Amazon’s cloud burst because its Northern Virginia Data Center, located near Dulles Airport, faced connectivity and redundancy problems because of redundancy! One of its Elastic Block Storage volumes underwent over mirroring of data, which as a result utilized Amazon’s gigantic storage capacity. This resulted in many websites experiencing downtime for almost 24 hours. Therefore all companies whose data was hosted on this server were incapacitated as a result of the crash.

Businesses dependent on a cloud for data storage must remember to build redundancies in case of eventualities like this. But startups do not have the wherewithal to hire multiple cloud systems. The Foursquares and Reddits of the world reposed their faith in Amazon’s unburstable cloud, in vain.

One may argue that instances of this nature cannot be totally prevented but one must wake up and smell the coffee. In the pre cloud technology era down times of this nature affected only a single company. Today is the day and age where the potentiality of the cloud is recognized and thousands of companies mainly startups and SMEs rely on its technology to help them host their data and web services. In a day and age where technology has made all of us interdependent and integrated, incidences such as these can be potential revenue disasters for companies on the cloud. After this incident, can we continue to rely on potentially brilliant technologies like the Cloud? Or will the Cloud burst and disappear? I feel the Amazon Cloudburst is a big learning curve for all of us. There must foolproof redundancies, policies and adequate structures put in place to ensure that data is migrated from cloudbursts and no single dependency is there. In an era where global IT is getting increasingly interdependent and consolidated, the challenge increases manifold.

Tags: Amazon cloud computing services cloud computing advantages