Own Your Own Availability: Zero Downtime During the AWS Outage

The East Coast is still reeling from a powerful storm that swept through the region on Friday, but the storm’s effects reverberated beyond the devastation in the Mid-Atlantic. On Friday, a lighting storm partially knocked out one of Amazon’s AWS availability zones in Virginia — and companies all over the globe felt the pinch. Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest and many other cloud-based companies that are built on AWS were down for significant periods of time or had sporadic availability issues.

The fact is that the downtime these companies — and their customers — experienced didn’t need to occur. And the blame shouldn’t be placed on the infrastructure that Amazon provides, nor is it an indicator that the public cloud is any less reliable than any other IT infrastructure.

The reaction to the AWS outage is a reminder that thousands of businesses and millions of users are consuming public cloud services based on