Amazing how the books we read a youngsters stay with us. Today I could just hear Chick Little and Lucy Goosey and others exclaiming, “The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!”
Today, the Amazon EC2 infrastructure is down. The cloud has fallen from the sky! This EC2 is the “elastic” infrastructure designed to scale up automatically to handle giant traffic spikes common to Amazon during the holidays. They have sold this service to many websites for “cloud” reliability. These websites relied on this part of the “cloud” to remain in the sky.
They expect the cloud to stay in the sky. Today they are wondering if the “cloud” is vapor ware. What happened to reliability?
I’ve been affected directly by outages or disruptions in service at My Lead Systems Pro and Spring Pad It. Each of these services were affected negatively by this outage.
You and I need to remember this day. It is a day to give reason for your weekly backup patterns. Reason to spread some of your online business to a variety of servers and services so failures like this only affect a portion of your business.
It is ironic I was lamenting the loss of some other web based services a week or so ago on The Teach Jim Show. Then I suggested there are times and ways to remain flexible even in light of possible loss or service outages. Maybe, today is a good time to remind ourselves how we can deal with loss and outages.

Maybe the sky is falling. It is OK. Embrace the unexpected. Rain is a natural phenomenon. Maybe we should go dance in it!

Teach Jim

Leveraging Learning into Significant Solutions