Amazon has posted an essay-length explanation of the cloud outage that took offline some of the Web's most popular services last week. In summary, it appears that human error during an system upgrade meant a redundant backup network for the Elastic Block Service (EBS) accidentally took up the entire network traffic in the U.S. East Region, overloading it, and jamming up the system.
Last week's outage of Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute, and specifically the company's lack of communications around that outage, point out the importance of transparency when working with a cloud provider.
Over the past year, four cloud storage service providers have said they're shutting down and Amazon's cloud services have been problematic since Thursday.
The servers are back up and users can once again check in on Foursquare and ask questions on Quora, but the legacy of last week's Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) outage will live on and provide important lessons for businesses as they look to cloud computing for their IT future.
The outage of Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service has shone a light on the number of Websites that use the service, which allows companies to hire computing power inexpensively on Amazon's systems.
For CIOs who distrust most technological promises (having heard too many of them), cloud computing sets off alarm bells. Yet those CIOs finding success in the cloud say their colleagues should be equally skeptical of IT managers who claim they can deliver better and cheaper results internally. (For expert advice about cloud-vendor contracts, see "How the Cloud Can Turn Toxic</a>.)
Last week we reported that HPC company Cycle Computing built a 10,000-core cluster on the Amazon EC2 cloud service. Cycle CEO Jason Stowe boasted that the cluster was big enough to make the list of the world's Top 500 supercomputers -- if only it had been subjected to the required speed test. Well, it turns out there already is a cloud-based supercomputer on the Top 500 list -- and it was built by Amazon itself.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers can now run their cloud applications on hardware dedicated to them, the company said on Monday.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added a number of networking features to its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering, allowing users to build data centers in the cloud that can be private, accessed from the Internet or both, the company said on Tuesday.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has upgraded its Web-based Management Console with features designed to make it easier to "scale up or scale down as [computing] needs change," according to a blog posted on Wednesday.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) will help IT staff to move virtual machines to the AWS cloud with a new plug-in for VMware's management platform, AWS said on Friday.
Amazon.com's remote computing arm has expanded into Japan after finding that developers in the tech-savvy Asian country want more local data storage and quicker data transfer times.
With the launch of CloudFormation, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is hoping to make it easier for enterprises to put together stacks of applications and resources for its cloud computing service, the company said on Friday.
The Gluster open-source file system is following the well-worn path into virtualization and cloud computing with the introduction on Tuesday of Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances for VMware and for the Amazon Web Services platform.
Oracle's database will be available in the second quarter as part of Amazon Web Services' Relational Database Service, the companies announced Tuesday.