Amazon Outage : The Other Side

“The Other Side” is the new section of my blog dedicated to looking at various news from a new angle. These would include technical, political all kinds of news. All of these are based on deductions and information sources used will be mentioned in the article.

The first article in the series is an OTHER SIDE view of Amazon outage on its flagship cloud computing offering.  Here is a news clipping about the success and importance of Amazon’ s cloud services division.

“Although the company ( Amazon)  has not revealed the revenue breakup from its cloud services division Amazon Web Services (AWS) in its annual report, UBS analysts estimate a figure of $500 million in 2010, and predicted to rise to $750 million in 2011 and a massive $2.5 billion in 2014. This is not far from Citigroup’s 2010 prediction of $650 million from AWS. AWS comprises Amazon’s 12 cloud computing offerings like Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform, Simple Storage Service (S3) offering and others. “[Source]

The Other Side of brain says what could Amazon gain out of this outage. This point of view is the contra bond among all the securities raining in the market.  Well on the face of it Amazon could lose a couple of clients which is very very unlikely since the existing ones have too little choices and migration itself is a very very costly exercise. As for those who were planning to move operations to cloud and have not done so already , they might delay their decisions. The cloud bashing groups  may get some points to jump around with . But the question remains who WINS….who gains out of all this….

Well, very simple AMAZON, AMAZON and AMAZON …It can now very easily sell its premium product offering of its cloud services. A services which guarantees even more than 99.XXX up time and which gives data insurance and security guarantee.   These gaurantees become more important as several more important and big customers come to fold of amazon. It is the likes of Foursquare, Reddit, Netflix who can’t afford these downtimes …..

What all can go RIGHT for Amazon from here … they won’t have any lawsuits because of outage since the service contract very well covers for it. The can pitch more premium packages. As for smaller clients , most of them have seen longer outages when managing their networks and servers themselves.

Did someone notice that no cloud storage company criticized Amazon for outage. Everyone curses Twitter for its outages and ridicules them for the Whale , but everyone if quiet…. if something like that would have happened to lets say Google Apps, Microsoft will screaming at the top of their voices about FISMA certifications irrespective of their own certification status, but that will be a different discussion.

Why is there so much silence from the other providers …Either they are afraid that this could happen to them too or they are smiling because the potential booty mentioned above will be shared with them too …

A weird and probably not so nice analogy is too instill fear and then sell weapons to counter it.  America sponsoring Mujahideens first and then selling weapons to everyone to counter them.  The university geek who put virus in network only when he has the cure for it and come out as savior.

I really do not know if it was intentional or accidental outage at Amazon, but if it was planned I am impressed with the marketing and strategy brains inside Amazon.

Amazon has come up with a detailed report on why the outage happened but THE OTHER SIDE still feels there just might be something behind this  ;)

References:

http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20056029-264.html

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/21/major-amazon-outage-ripples-across-web/

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216064/Amazon_gets_black_eye_from_cloud_outage

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216151/Investigation_on_after_Amazon_s_cloud_nightmare

http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2011/02/how-big-is-the-cloud-computing-market/

http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2011/01/where-is-cloud-computing-going-up-up-and-away/