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NEW YORK Usually people dont notice the cloud unless, that is, it turns into a massive storm. Which was the case Tuesday when Amazons huge cloud-computing service suffered a major outage.

Amazon Web Services, by far the worlds largest provider of internet-based computing services, suffered an unspecified breakdown in its eastern U.S. region starting about midday Tuesday. The result: unprecedented and widespread performance problems for thousands of websites and apps.

While few services went down completely, thousands, if not tens of thousands, of companies had trouble with features ranging from file sharing to webfeeds to loading any type of data from Amazons simple storage service, known as S3. Amazon services began returning around 4 p.m. EST, and an hour later the company noted on its service site that S3 was fully recovered and operating normally.

THE CONCENTRATED CLOUD

The breakdown shows the risks of depending heavily on a few big companies for cloud computing. Amazons service is significantly larger by revenue than any of its nearest rivals Microsofts Azure, Googles Cloud Platform and IBM, according to Forrester Research.

With so few large providers, any outage can have a disproportionate effect. But some analysts argue that the Amazon outage doesnt prove theres a problem with cloud computing it just highlights how reliable the cloud normally is.

The outage, said Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti, shouldnt cause companies to assume the cloud is dangerous.

Amazons problems began when one S3 region based in Virginia began to experience what the company called increased error rates. In a statement, Amazon said as of 4 p.m. EST it was still experiencing errors that were impacting various AWS services.

We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue, the company said.

WHY S3 MATTERS

Amazon S3 stores files and data for companies on remote servers. Amazon started offering it in 2006, and its used for everything from building websites and apps to storing images, customer data and commercial transactions.

Anything you can think about storing in the most cost-effective way possible, is how Rich Mogull, CEO of data security firm Securosis, puts it.

Since Amazon hasnt said exactly what is happening yet, its hard to know just how serious the outage is. We do know its bad, Mogull said. We just dont know how bad.

At S3 customers, the problem affected both front-end operations meaning the websites and apps that users see and back-end data processing that takes place out of sight. Some smaller online services, such as Trello, Scribd and IFTTT, appeared to be down for a while, although all have since recovered.

The corporate message service Slack, by contrast, stayed up, although it reported degraded service for some features. Users reported that file sharing in particular appeared to freeze up.

The Associated Press own photos, webfeeds and other online services were also affected.

TECHNICAL KNOCKOUTAGE

Major cloud-computing outages dont occur very often perhaps every year or two but they do happen. In 2015, Amazons DynamoDB service, a cloud-based database, had problems that affected companies like Netflix and Medium. But usually providers have workarounds that can get things working again quickly.

Whats really surprising to me is that theres no fallback usually there is some sort of backup plan to move data over, and it will be made available within a few minutes, said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

AFTEREFFECTS

Forresters Bartoletti said the problems on Tuesday could lead to some Amazon customers storing their data on Amazons servers in more than one location, or even shifting to other providers.

A lot more large companies could look at their application architecture and ask how could we have insulated ourselves a little bit more, he said. But he added, I dont think it fundamentally changes how incredibly reliable the S3 service has been.

Read more from the original source:
When Amazon's cloud storage fails, lots of people get wet - Savannah Morning News