Why AWS wasn't the real point of failure
So, Amazon Web Services went AWOL this week, leaving many websites inoperable.
In the currently climate of fake and inaccurate news, it is important to read beyond the headline to realise that “AWS” did not go down; rather one service in one region went down. Namely S3 on AWS US East Region.
If your “cloud” solution had a single point of failure (S3 on AWS US East Region) then guess what, if that single point fails, then your solution fails. And many did.
Industry has known and architected traditional business solutions for decades now; it has known about single points of failures; it has read the many case studies of successful business continuity solutions of how good architectures have saved the day when services fail.
So, why because “it’s the cloud” should anything be different?
Surely a good cloud architecture would eliminate single points of failure?
We’ve seen the news of the services running on AWS that failed. I hope in time we get the case studies of the services running on AWS that successfully survived the outage with good solution architectures!
AWS didn't fail – the real failure for these organisations is having a single point of failure.
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About the author
Colin Robbins is a Principal Security Consultant, leading customer-funded research activities in secure interoperability and information exchange. He has specific technical interests in the Single Information Environment and Data Centric Security, as well as the processes of security, such as Secure by Design and Information Security Management Systems (ISMS). He is a Fellow of CIISec, and a former NCSC certified Security and Information Risk Adviser (Lead CCP).