Amazon's cloud hiccups, again

Brandon Butler (Network World)
09 January, 2013 21:57
Comments

Less than a month after a 12-hour-plus outage on Christmas Eve, Amazon Web Service's Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service in its US-East availability zone experienced elevated error rates for about 45 minutes today.

At 1:36 p.m. ET AWS reported on its health status page that EBS volumes in its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) were experiencing error rates and latencies. It did not say why. By 2:15 p.m. ET, the issue had been resolved. It's unclear how many customers were affected.

CLOUD SHOWDOWN: Amazon vs. Rackspace (OpenStack) vs. Microsoft vs. Google

The US-East-1 region has seen its fair share of issues during the past 18 months. In addition to the Christmas Eve outage, the Northern Virginia sites were also host to outages in October and others last summer and the year before.

Some analysts have suggested that continual service disruptions from Amazon could make customers look at other providers, not that they've necessarily got any better track records. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has said in the past that failures are inevitable and Amazon and customers share a responsibility to ensure applications hosted in the company's cloud are able to survive downtime.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.