The blogosphere was rife with complaints from small businesses who relied on the service, and whose day was ruined. While customers normally have to apply for billing credit under their SLAs, Amazon said they would get credited automatically for this event.
The system also had an outage in February, and Amazon's service status page indicates that there is no shortage of drama behind the scenes, with a list of maintenance issues and glitches that you'd expect from any large system.
The cloud has undeniable utility, but inevitably it provides an additional point of possible failure to any enterprises that uses it.
In the final analysis, an enterprise's relation to the cloud is similar to its relation to the power companywhen there is a power outage, all you can do is hope for an early resolution. In the meantime, it's good to have backup batteries. With the cloud, it's good to have in-house servers.
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