Amazon: 'Networking event' triggered problems with EBS storage

I hate articles like this.

Outages happen. Stuff breaks. Plan for it. When it happens in a way you don't have a plan for, update your plan.

Last I heard, reddit was operating with 1 sysadmin. If they had to employee the staff to run their own hardware AND own their own hardware, I suspect we wouldn't have reddit: it wouldn't be profitable. I'm also part of a startup, and thanks to AWS, we were able to be in two separate data centers from day 1. In the past companies, it's a struggle to get one up and running.

Plus, if they were running their own datacenter and had a 'network event', don't you think it would be down anyway? In fact, I'd expect more outages due to less available capacity to fail over to.

Running your machines on EC2 is no less risky than running them at Rackspace or any other non-cloud hosting providing. If there is an outage in core infrastructure, you're going to be down. If you think a 99.999 uptime guarantee means anything when the shit hits the fan, you've probably never worked with hosting providers before.

For some reason I pictured a bunch of sysadmins at a cocktail party with their phones turned off swapping business cards. Then I read the article.