A lack of communication is one of the real concerns that comes out of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) disruption this week.
To its credit, AWS did update its dashboard that gives updates about the service. That was pretty much it. The AWS blog had nothing about the incldent. It was updated today. But it had nothing to do with the outage. It was about AWS training.
This is while customers, many startups included, were trying to keep things together.
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BigDoor CEO Keith Smith summed it up this way:
Starting at 1:41 a.m. PST, Amazon’s updates read as if they were written by their attorneys and accountants who were hedging against their stated SLA rather than being written by a tech guy trying to help another tech guy.
There are ramifications for the silence. First off, it puts AWS in a poor light. This incident will pass but it is going to have its effects. It fuels speculation about AWS service not being up to par for application developers. It looks like Joyent has already jumped on that issue.
That’s one effect. Then there is the downstream problems that occur. Customers and partners face lots of scrutiny when they have outages. The silence from AWS only makes it harder to communicate what is happening. They don’t have anything they can say because there is limited information available to share.
The effect on the market is harder to pin down. On the upside, the outage will hopefully help people realize how little we know about the level of scaling that comes with cloud computing. Let’s just hope AWS contributes to that conversation.
What do you think?
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