Don’t just blame the cloud for the Amazon Web Services outage

Amazon Web Services has once again found itself in the unenviable position of being the poster-boy-turned-whipping-boy for the cloud computing world due to another high-profile service disruption that severely slowed down or knocked out a handful of heavily trafficked websites and services, including Netflix, Reddit, Airbnb, imgur, Pinterest, Heroku, and Foursquare.

Like clockwork, the outage has generated a healthy debate around the blogosphere as to whether this most recent downtime spells doom for the cloud in general or for Amazon in particular, or whether affected AWS users accept a share of the blame for taking the cheap route and signing up for the bare-bones, single-region AWS services to host their mission-critical services.

AWS confirmed on its status page at 11:11 p.m. PT yesterday that it had experienced “degraded performance for a small number of EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes.” The page said that the issue was restricted to a single Availability Zone within the U.S.-East-1 Region, which is in Northern Virginia.

If that region rings a bell, it’s because it was at the center of the significant AWS outages earlier this year: The facility suffered an outage in June — purportedly caused by a line of powerful thunderstorms but also some bugginess — that disrupted services, including Elastic Compute, Elastic Cache, Elastic MapReduce, and Relational Database Services. A previous Amazon Web Services outage occurred in the same facility on June 14.

By this morning, AWS reported it had restored IO for the majority of EBS volumes, and a small number of volumes would require customer action to restore IO. The company also reported that the remainder of affected ELB load balancers had been recovered, and those services were operating normally.

Amazon’s Relational Database Service also was affected. At 11:03 yesterday morning, Amazon reported experiencing “connectivity issues and degraded performance for a small number of RDS DB Instances” in a single Availability Zone in the Northern Virginia data center. By around 2 p.m. Pacific, the company stated that the “recovery process to bring remaining RDS instances back online was continuing at a steady pace.”

“Customers can launch new database instances,” according to the status report. “Customers with impaired DB instances do have the option of initiating a Point in Time Restore operation.”

Also affected was the CloudSearch service, which was causing elevated error rates for the search and document service. The company said those problems had been fixed by just after midnight Pacific.

Amazon has been mum on the cause of these outages, but that hasn’t stopped the predictable deluge of criticism and speculation from onlookers as to where the blame ultimately lies.

The easiest target is — and will continue to be — the cloud itself. You don’t have to go far in comment threads and select blogs to see chiding comments along the lines of, “But I thought the cloud was supposed to solve all our problems! Boy, I am glad we host our own site or services.”

No surprises there: The cloud has been the target of slings and arrows since day one. Sure, cloud computing can bring new complexities and, thanks to its porous nature, new vulnerabilities to an IT environment. Then again, the same could be said when laptop computers, mobile devices, and network-connected remote offices came along. Heck, even the Internet itself is a huge security threat. But the cloud provides levels of flexibility and affordable, easy access to powerful computing resources that have undeniably helped organizations young and old thrive.

Embracing the cloud in general means doing your homework, assessing risks (how much downtime can you tolerate each year?), and finding the service provider that best suits your organization’s specific needs. For complex or mission-critical deployment, it could also mean having system admins on staff who know how to architect and oversee a resilient cloud-based system. Putting all of your eggs in any one basket is a recipe for unwanted omelets.

Or to put it in the words of techies from Netflix commenting on the previous AWS outage: “Netflix made the decision to move from the data center to the cloud several years ago. While it’s easy and common to blame the cloud for outages because it’s outside of our control, we found that our overall availability over the past several years has steadily improved. When we dig into the root-causes of our biggest outages, we find that we can typically put in resiliency patterns to mitigate service disruption.”

AWS, too, is taking shots for this latest outage — understandably so. As noted, this is the third time this year that company has experienced a high-profile outage. That’s enough to get customers to peruse their AWS SLAs to see if Amazon has delivered the level of uptime it’s promised. Additionally, it’s not far-fetched too speculate that something’s amiss in the Northern Virginia facility, which the company needs to address stat.

The good news is that customers have choices. If you’re an AWS user who has suffered more downtime than you can handle, you might consider forking over more cash to Amazon for multiregion redundancy (balanced loads on the East and West Coasts), not to be confused with multi-availability zones, which spreads loads across zones in a specific region (for example, all on the East Coast).

Making sure you or your key IT staffers are well-trained in all things AWS doesn’t hurt either. Amazon has noted during this latest round of outages that customers who have architected their systems according to AWS’s best practices of spreading workloads were less likely to have experienced issues.

It’s also plausible that AWS isn’t a good fit for your organization. Maybe you need more functionality or a higher uptime guarantee. Or maybe you’ve given AWS every opportunity to meet your needs, and the company has come up short. There are other fish in the cloud, as it were, including Google, Microsoft, and Rackspace — and more to come. What’s more, cloud-platform vendors like Rackspace, Oracle, and Red Hat are steadily rolling out wares to help companies create and host their own private (or hybrid) clouds. That growing competition should keep the folks at AWS on their toes and actively working to improve their service to make it as appealing and reliable as possible.

The bottom line is that the cloud is a game changer, and companies large and small are enjoying huge benefits from its affordable flexibility. However, it never has been and never will been a simple prescription for any and all IT headaches. Improperly implemented, it can create a security or performance nightmare. Amazon certainly has some ‘splainin’ and reassuring to do if it wants to maintain its reputation as a cloud leader. Amazon’s competitors have a chance to convince skeptics that they can do what Amazon does, only better. But organizations ultimately have to accept some responsibility for cloud snafus if they’re embracing the platform without due diligence.

This story, “Don’t just blame the cloud for the Amazon Web Services outage,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.