Amazon Web Services last April suffered what many consider to be the worst cloud service outage to date - an event that knocked big name customers such as Reddit, Foursquare, HootSuite, Quora and others offline, some for as many as four days.
So, a year after AWS's major outage, has the leading Infrastructure-as-a-Service and cloud provider made changes necessary to prevent another meltdown? And if there is a huge repeat, are enterprises prepared to cope? The answers are not cut and dried, experts say.
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In part, it's difficult to answer these questions because AWS is notoriously close-lipped about the inner workings of its massive cloud operations, which not only had an outage last April, but suffered a shorter-lived disruption in August. What's more, it's hard to get a read on individual cloud customers' private plans, although industry watchers such as IDC analyst Stephen Hendrick say many enterprises have a long way to go to be fully isolated from provider shortfalls.
"Some folks had their bases covered, for others, it hit them pretty hard," says IDC analyst Stephen Hendrick, recalling last year's AWS outage. "There are certainly lessons to be learned, the question is whether customers want to do what it really takes to protect themselves."
