Amazon EC2 cloud service experiences power outage… again

Earlier this week, Amazon’s EC2 cloud service experienced yet another power outage. This time, a car crashed into a local utility pole and knocked out the power. The generator transfer switch failed. A number of East Coast customers lost service for about an hour.

A very similar incident occurred in 2007 at a RackSpace data center. Regardless of this, Amazon needs to get its act together. Why didn’t the server load transfer over to the generators properly?

The cloud computing provider surely won’t be signing up very many new customers if these power outages continue. Finally, current EC2 users must be very upset about this and worried about Amazon’s long-term reliability.

Amazon addresses cloud computing power issues

After power outages on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service resulted in a loss of service for some users on May 4 and May 8, Amazon has announced that it is working on a change in its power distribution to address the issue. The company said the changes will, “significantly reduce the number of instances that can be affected by failures like we have seen in the last week.”

The outages were caused by the failure of several electrical components as well as human error. Several disgruntled users report experiencing data loss as well.
While most EC2 users will unaffected by the power failures, this just goes to show that cloud computing isn’t perfectly reliable and there is still a lot of progress to be made in the field of distributed computing.