Today’s brief disruption of Amazon Web Services (AWS) coming on the heels of last week’s longer outage may have been minor in comparison to the extended problems which occurred last year, but they will still spark a new round of debate regarding the reliability of Cloud services and relative costs of downtime.  These issues will also bring renewed attention to preventive measures IT folks can take to handle Cloud service disruptions of any scale.

By coincidence, around the same time that AWS suffered its outage, the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR) released its first Availability Ranking of World Cloud Computing (ARWC) report which stated that,

“The average unavailability of Cloud services is estimated to 10 hours per year or more. Average availability is estimated to 99.9% or less.”

The IWGCR’s estimation method relies on public press reports of Cloud incidents. … Read More »