Amazon’s outage was prominent in the news this past week. Many of Amazon’s high profile clients were affected including: Spotify, Pinterest and Buzzfeed, as captured in many news reports. In fact, Business Insider reports that 54 of the top 100 retailers were affected by the outage with a decline in performance of 20% or greater. Amazon later revealed in a blog post that the 4-hour interruption was due to “human error” after one of its employees entered the wrong command while conducting routine maintenance.
While we can question how this happened to such a big name in cloud – and many have – the events that follow a service interruption are often just as critical. Getting back online is just part of the equation. Customers need constant updates, one-on-one troubleshooting, and estimates of how long it will take to get back online, in order to assess and minimize the business impact.
This recent outage seems to have been particularly painful for customers. As Gizmodo detailed: several of the systems involved hadn’t been rebooted in years so they took “longer than expected” to come back online.
With a third of all internet traffic reportedly flowing through AWS (as reported by Gizmodo) including some of the biggest retailers, we can presume that personal, one-on-one support would not have been feasible in the hours following the outage. With Pinterest on one line and Spotify calling in to another support agent, how do we think the thousands of other AWS customers would rank in the queue?
We take a different approach, with top-tier support as part of the dinCloud experience for every customer. dinCloud customers enjoy personalized service, whether we are helping them get set up or working to optimize their environment. We’ll even know you by name.
With Amazon’s vulnerabilities coming to light with this and other recent outages, consider how much attention you’d get if you were impacted by a similar interruption in the future. If you expect to be treated like more than just a number, with personalized support for your cloud environment, give us a call. Here, you’re much more than just a number.
