AWS Reliability Called into Question

The reliability of Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been questioned over the last couple of weeks as the Netflix movie service crashed due to an AWS outage, leaving thousands unable to watch a movie on Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Day, Netflix tweeted that the service had been restored: "Special thanks to our awesome members for being patient. We're back to normal streaming levels. We hope everyone has a great holiday."

At AWS' first annual conference in Las Vegas in November last year, the company was keen to emphasize its close partnership with Netflix; the CEO of the latter, Reed Hastings, was even present during the opening keynote.

Even though Netflix was able to show good spirit over the outage, the reliability of AWS will have to be addressed, particularly as this was the third major interruption in 2012.

The AWS service dashboard indicated interruptions in its service for Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which offers the hosting of computing capacity; this occurred on Dec. 24. Interruptions were also noted for its Cloud Watch (which monitors services) and Elastic Beanstalk (which manages provisioning and load balancing) services.

More detail regarding the outage will be follow soon, according to a spokesperson at AWS: "AWS experienced issues with the Elastic Load Balancing service that impacted some customers in the US-EAST region. Impacted customers started to recover the evening of Dec. 24 and the service was fully recovered and functioning correctly on Dec. 25. We have been heads-down ensuring customers are operating smoothly and will be publishing a full summary of the event in the coming days."

Businesses already rest an inquisitive eye on AWS, as they seek to ascertain whether or not the cloud environment can be trusted with their mission-critical IT resources.

An analyst with Technology Business Research (TBR), Jillian E. Mirandi, wrote that relying on AWS to host a significant proportion of their businesses may mean that the companies migrate to other services it the faults continue; this statement followed the previous outage.

Mirandi added: "TBR believes that the market spotlight is on AWS when it comes to outages as it is the biggest IaaS vendor and supports well-known customers." It appears that the outage over the Christmas period will strengthen that focus. (CY) Link