Amazon’s S3 service appears to be down today. While I don’t have anything on S3, I view this outage as a good thing. I have been considering using Amazon’s cloud computing services (S3, EC2, SimpleDB) for statzen. I have been hesitant to build a system on their architecture because it is not easily replicable.
It is one thing to build on a proprietary system when you own access to that system (i.e. building on Sun or Windows). It is quite another thing to allow yourself to be locked in to a service that would be difficult to move away from and you are at the constant mercy of your vendor.
No one knows how long S3 will be down; it could be up by the time this post publishes. It could be that S3 is down for days. What then? It is not like you can run a backup system on Google’s S3 or on a self hosted solution. It would require reworking your application architecture to compensate for vendor error. That is an unacceptable risk to me.
I have been on the fence about using Amazon’s services. I like the idea of them, but the dependence scares me. Today’s outage pretty much seals the deal for me.
Update: Local Nashville tech company Sitening has more details of the outage.
