Amazon EC2 Outage Coverage: When will the darkened clouds clear?

Last week’s Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) outage has served as quite the scare and reality check for IT departments and CIOs across the country. The main lesson that seems to have been learned is don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

To add insult to injuries, The Register reports on the confusion many customers are experiencing regarding their service level agreements post-downtime. Though the EC2 SLA states that users can receive credits if the service’s annual uptime percentage falls below 99.95%, many are finding that they fall through the loopholes in the fine print. As The Register reports, “[T]his only applies to users who have spread their applications across multiple ‘availability zones’ – subsections of Amazon’s regional services designed not to fail at the same time.” In other words, if your data isn’t spread across the EC2 service, and thus more downtime-proof, you most likely won’t be receiving a credit anytime soon. For those companies that did read the fine print and planned for disaster from day one, there was significantly less damage.

Whether you’re a cloud supporter or an anti-cloudie, you probably have an opinion on Amazon’s EC2 fiasco this past week. Bloggers around IT Knowledge Exchange took this opportunity to calm frightened users and learn valuable lessons. Take a look:

• TechStop’s Joshua Wood gave a quick rundown of what the outage meant for users and why Amazon’s Cloud Outage isn’t that big of a deal.
• Tom Nolle of Uncommon Wisdom thinks that cloud views need to get realistic.
• Storage Channel Pipeline’s Eric Slack teaches a valuable lesson to those concerned about preparing for cloud outages: Add a second provider.
• Always the voice of reason and optimism amidst cloud doubt, Ron Miller of View From Above chides cloud haters who jumped at the Amazon EC2 fiasco.
• Editor Michael Morisy wondered, in the wake of Amazon, iPhone and Dropbox, is there a new normal?

Also see IT forum questions on Cloud Computing.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.