So many cloud pundits are piling on to the misfortunes of Amazon Web Services this week as a response to the massive failures in the AWS Virginia region. If you think this week exposed weakness in the cloud, you don’t get it: it was the cloud’s shining moment, exposing the strength of cloud computing.
In short, if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn’t Amazon’s fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon’s cloud computing model. The strength of cloud computing is that it puts control over application availability in the hands of the application developer and not in the hands of your IT staff, data center limitations, or a managed services provider.
The AWS outage highlighted the fact that, in the cloud, you control your SLA in the cloud—not AWS.
via O’Reilly Broadcast – The AWS Outage: The Cloud’s Shining Moment. The article even goes through the process of what it would take to permit you to have stayed up through Amazon’s recent downtime.