Reasons for Amazon Cloud Service Shut Down Explored

July 24, 2012

Cloud computing may be affordable and energy efficient, but it is not without fail despite the efforts of marketing language might try to present it as otherwise. The recent Amazon EC₂ Outage received some attention by Dmitriy Samovskiy in his article, “Applying 5 Whys to Amazon EC₂ Outage.” He describes the reasons behind the service disruption which occurred on Friday June 29, 2012.

Using a deductive dialogue inquiring why this outage occurred, the author eventually states the following:

“The EC2 and EBS APIs are implemented on multi-Availability Zone replicated datastores. These datastores are used to store metadata for resources such as instances, volumes, and snapshots. To protect against datastore corruption, currently when the primary copy loses power, the system automatically flips to a read-only mode in the other Availability Zones until power is restored to the affected Availability Zone or until we determine it is safe to promote another copy to primary.”

Heavily immersed in a world of cloud computing, we have essentially replaced the local crash with an “out there” crash. Cloud computing is the future, but that does not mean we do not see room for critique as the feeling of helplessness creeps upon us when a crash occurs out there in the cloud.

Megan Feil, July 24, 2012

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.