With Amazon’s ongoing struggles with part of their cloud, I’ve obviously been watching closely, given that I work for a company that provides a cloud for communication applications (hosted almost entirely on our own global carrier-grade infrastructure). Watching Amazon’s status site, they continue to not be entirely back in action a couple of days later.
There have been a lot of great technical posts out there related to what’s happening with AWS. Two that caught my eye are admittedly by an Amazon competitor, Joyent, but are definitely worth a read:
- On Cascading Failures and Amazon’s Elastic Block Store
- Magical Block Store: When Abstractions Fail Us
The latter post about abstraction layers hits a few major points with me, particularly around the need for abstraction layers to allow some type of control… and some type of transparency into what is going on.
Black boxes are great… until they break.
Another great post was by George Reese over in the O’Reilly Community (he is CTO of enStratus, a company making equipment to assist in infrastructure automation):
Reese argues that it is the application developer’s responsibility to design apps in such a way that they aren’t dependent at all on the underlying infrastructure.
This all takes me back to my post I wrote in 2009 about the need for services to be distributed and decentralized. Now I was talking in there about Twitter and Facebook… but the same argument can be made for apps in general…
It’s a fascinating time… I hope for Amazon’s sake that they can get everything back in action soon… and it will be interesting to see what questions this all makes developers ask with regard to cloud providers. Meanwhile, I’m enjoying many of these deep technical posts… I expect to see more coming in the days and weeks ahead.
