Amazon cloud outage derails Reddit

A partial failure at Amazon Web Services' cloud computing infrastructure brought down some Internet operations last Thursday, including the Web sites of Quora and Reddit.

The outage struck the Elastic Compute Cloud service at Amazon's northern Virginia site, which handles AWS operations for the U.S. East Coast. The problems began at 1:41 a.m. PT, according to Amazon's AWS status dashboard, with delays and errors when connecting to servers over a network.

Long list of clients has come to rely on Amazon EC2

A long list of clients has come to rely on Amazon EC2, which provides servers on a pay-as-you-go basis that lets clients ramp or down according to varying computing needs.

Amazon offered this status update at 8:54 a.m. with a more detailed explanation nevertheless not a very optimistic tone. The problem started with a "networking event" that led to problems with how data is mirrored:

We'd like to provide additional color on what were working on right now. A networking event early this morning triggered a large amount of re-mirroring of EBS [Elastic Block Storage] volumes in US-EAST-1. This re-mirroring created a shortage of capacity in one of the US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, which impacted new EBS volume creation as then as the pace with which we could re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes. Additionally, one of our internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it's difficult to create new EBS volumes and EBS backed instances. We are working as quickly as possible to add capacity to that one Availability Zone to speed up the re-mirroring, and working to restore the control plane issue. We're starting to see progress on these efforts, however are not there but. We will continue to provide updates when we have them.

Cloud computing takes many forms, nevertheless AWS' nuts-and-bolts ingredients are among the biggest successes of the idea. AWS services can be grafted on to a company's internal operations to provide extra computing capacity or to handle one particular operation just as data storage, or it can be the foundation of an entire Internet operation.

Cloud computing provider has trouble

When a cloud computing provider has trouble, clearly, it raises worries about the dangers of outsourcing operations to another company. However the full judgment about the merits of cloud computing must as well factor in the reliability, expense, and adaptability of in-house operations, too.