So far the comments have focused on the technical aspects outlined as points of failure in Amazon's summary: grid failure, diesel generator failure, and the complexities of the amazon stack.
What are your thoughts on Amazon's professionalism in their response and action plan going forward? If you're an AWS customer does this style of response keep you on board?
The level of clarity in post incident reporting by Amazon is excellent. During-incident, sub-par. Amazon seems to try to minimize any "more than just a single AZ is affected" in their realtime reporting during outages. There's also a disconnect between the graphics and the text.
What I don't like is that they make repeated promises about AZes and features which are repeatedly shown to be untrue. They also have never disclosed their testing methodology, which leads me to assume there isn't much of one. That makes me unlikely to rely on any AWS services I can't myself fully exercise, or which haven't shown themselves to be robust. S3, sure. EC2, sure (except don't depend on modifying instances on any given day during an outage). EBS, oh hell no. ELB, probably not my first choice, and certainly not my sole ft/ha layer. Route 53, which I haven't messed with, actually does seem really good, but since it's complex, I'm scared given the track record of the other complex components.
"What I don't like is that they make repeated promises about AZes and features which are repeatedly shown to be untrue."
Thats pretty much SOP in the hosting business, nobody really knows whats going to happen because nobody really knows how to test. Most developers can/do not understand what ops failures are like, and therefore most testing is only superficial.
Right, but I think we've established Amazon is actually a software company which happens to run a retail business and contract for some datacenters. Same way Google is either a supercomputer company or an advertising company which uses search to get users cheaply.
Well if you look at their status page ( http://status.aws.amazon.com/ ) none of the statuses shows red. Yellow clearly says its for performance issues and red is for service disruptions. If this isn't service disruption then I don't know what is.
Reading between the lines from both the posted note and their persistent failure to provide correct statuses: the ops guys over there are in full CYA desperation mode somewhere around 100% of the time, and a culture of 'it wasn't me', fuelled either by job fear, or promotion fear, or fear of being noticed by bezos, is in full bloom.
