Lessons from the EC2 Crash

The advantages of utilities is that they are available when you need them and are cheap, as in less costly. They can be turned off by the user at his desire which helps regulate the cost. The reverse is that it can also happen that the utility can get shut off and then you are left in the lurch. It’s like using electricity from a grid, available on demand, metered to your consumption, perfect for business, till it shuts off and leaves you in the dark.

The Cloud has often been compared to a utility service only much safer and robust, available to match your budget and needs so that your business is cost effective and can expand with capital constraints. The fact is that cloud services have been available for quite some time and have been relatively reliable. This perception however, took a bit of a jolt last week, on around the 21st of April when Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 had a disruption in services for clients, in some cases for more than 36 hours. There were around 75 sites which crashed because of this outage. Needless to say the clients were not happy with some being at the risk of being put out of business, an event which has happened in previous cloud outages from other vendors.

The EC2 service has been available for more than five years, and has grown over time. The outage happened not because of any internet issues or security issues, which many would have thought to be the key culprits. The fault lay somewhere else, in one of their data centres and an ongoing upgrade there.
For those clients dependent on EC2 or any other outsourced service this again highlights the danger of choosing to outsource services without having a clear assessment of needs and business impacts of failure. It highlights the importance of contingency plans for business continuity.

Outsourcing is a reality and makes business sense. However the question of outsourcing is not just about saving money on a transactional cost calculation basis but a wider overall cost benefit analysis. With passing time organizations need to be cost effective while continuing to provide excellence in their services. No organization will have a monopoly forever, allowing it to charge a premium. It would need to constantly innovate, and reduce its costs of operations.
For this, organizations need to constantly train and imbibe in its people the value of excellence. In the words of Aristotle

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

The lessons learnt from the EC2 crash are that outsourcing and its implications need to be learnt and that there is no substitute for constant training to provide excellence in service.