Newvem Offers Advice to AWS Users In Midst of Major Outage

Well, it turns out the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage I referred to in my previous blog entry was more significant than originally reported.
The initial issues being suffered by AWS last Friday were compounded by the severe weather which hit the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states later that day. The impact of the outage has also been more widespread than just a small number of Cloud companies, as indicated by this New York Times article which discusses the broader effects on a diverse cross-section of companies and consumers.
The outage also came shortly after Gartner announced that it expects Cloud storage services to experience exponential growth over the next 3-4 years,
“The desire to share content and to access it on multiple devices will motivate consumers to start storing a third of their digital content in the cloud by 2016, [up from] just 7 percent of consumer content … in 2011.”
Given the growing dependency on Cloud services and prominent role which AWS plays in supporting these services, Newvem has published a useful set of tips based on data it has collected from AWS utilization records which I highlighted in my previous post:
- Take advantage of multiple availability zones when using elastic load balancing (ELB).
- Be aware of unhealthy instances behind ELBs.
- Maintain timely snapshots of your EBSs.
- Keep critical data copies off the AWS Cloud.
- Use an external tool to monitor your system.
Newvem’s KnowYourCloud Analytic service can scan your AWS environment, detect how vulnerable it is to potential problems, and recommend specific steps to avoid serious issues from arising.
Click here to learn more about Newvem’s tips and monitoring services to mitigate the risks associated with AWS service disruptions.