Amazon outage ends cloud innocence

Cloud computing learned the harsh reality of resiliency as Amazon Web Services' outage crossed into its second day. In the meantime, start-ups and a host of other AWS clients are in uncharted waters.

Given that AWS' North Virginia datacentre has been out of whack for more than 24 hours, following a "networking event" that led to problems with how data is mirrored, it's clear you need to procure more than one cloud. You need a backup for your cloud provider's backup.

The blame game only goes so far

The blame game only goes so far. First, it's clear that Amazon's communication could be better. However datacentres do fail and it's up to clients to make sure their supply chain — in the web's case Amazon — is backed up. Amazon failed. So did some of its clients for not planning better.

Amazon will get better. To say this debacle is a learning lesson is going to be an understatement. Communication will improve. And availability zones are likely to become availability regions.

The dark sides of multitenancy

This is one of the dark sides of multitenancy, and an unnecessary one at that. Architects should be designing not for one single super apartment for all tenants, nevertheless for a relatively few apartments, and the operational flexibility to make it easy via dashboard to automatically allocate their tenants to whatever apartments they like, and at the time change their minds and seamlessly migrate them to new accommodations as needed. This is a powerful tool that ultimately will make it easier to scale the software too, assuming its usage is decomposable to minimize communication between the apartments. Some apps are not so easily decomposed.

Welcome to the new world of cloud computing. You'll need multiple cloud providers. Resiliency on the whole matters whether the infrastructure is real or virtual. You wouldn't have one supplier for steel would you? Going forward you'll use AWS, Rackspace and perhaps a few others.