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Amazon Web Services

Outage Analyser shows cloud service outages

technologyEdward Kiledjian
Outage Analyser is a free website that compiles data from 150,000 Compuware Application Performance Management agents deployed at customer sites. This is an interesting administrator tool because it attempts to show the root cause of an internet service outage, regions that may be affected, dependent services and detected down websites.
Each service provider has its own service status page (Amazon AWS, Google Apps health dashboard, Microsoft Azure Status Dashboard, Salesforce.com system status, etc). Outage Analyser is a neutral third party which attempts to aggregate most of that data (and more) and show it in an unbiased map.
I think Outage Analyser is a great tool for administrators but could definitely use a nicer interface.
The downside of Outage Analyser is that it only uses data collected from its customers therefore if its customers aren't using a service, an outage may not show-up.
This is a nice tool to keep in your toolkit but because of the limitations, can't be your only source.

When buying cloud, think redundancy

technologyEdward Kiledjian
Last Thursday, Amazon Web Services (U.S. East data center in Virginia which is one of its oldest and largest data centers) experienced a major outage which impacted some large name brand internet sites for several hours.

As expected competitors were quick to jump on social media sites to announce that their services remained available and some enterprise pessimists may use this to justify not moving some of their enterprise services to the cloud. The reality is that outages happen whether your apps run in the cloud or your own datacenter. The reason AWS outages get more air time is because of the incredible number of services now dependent on Amazon’s Web Services. AWS is no more likely to go down than any of its major competitors.

The important message here is to ensure you have redundancy and High Availability built into your enterprise architecture from the start. Determine your tolerance for downtime and design accordingly.