Amazon was in the news of late for the wrong reasons again. In April this year, the Amazon web services (AWS) hosted off their Northern Virgina data center started experiencing major connectivity and latency issues. This escalated into a full blown outage lasting 24 hours and took down hundreds of AWS clients' services including those of Foursquare, Reddit and Wildfire. The event received mainstream media coverage in CNN, The New York Times and Washington Post. Not only was it an embarrassment for Amazon, but it also raised nagging doubts in the minds of the fence-sitters on the cloud question. Wasn't - reliability through redundancy a key promise of the Cloud? What happened to all that?
What got merely a passing mention in that story, was the fact that Amazon's key customer Netflix was not affected by the outage at all. Now - the customer with the biggest exposure does not feel a thing? How does that happen? Did they get special treatment or somehow got lucky ?
Turns out it was neither. In fact, there is a whole sub-story in there that got discussed in primarily technical circuits - and that tell us a thing or two about the best practices of a cloud sourcing strategy.
