Amazon AWS EC2 cloud failure

Amazon has finally published it’s write-up of the outage that occurred starting 4/21/2011 - http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648 .

Honestly I have to hand it to Amazon for single-handedly creating the cloud-computing race. Remember they were an online store, not a datacenter hosting company. They have to be the healthiest company around in terms of constantly improving, expanding, driving into and inventing new products and markets.

But I want to challenge them here. They’ve made something where there was nothing. But I don’t think they have gone far enough yet in cloud computing in terms of offering server computing as a service. I think they owe it to their customers to make some more of this complexity disappear. I’m talking about geographic fault tolerance. I can’t believe in this day and age companies still think they can bet their business on single-site deployments, no matter what kind of clustering and zoning is in place. Amazon needs to take over another layer of the stack here, and make global load-balancing automatic and standard, just build it in to everything.

Sure it’s hard. But right now Amazon is asking the customer to do that hard thing as a one-off baked into their application infrastructure design. Imagine the world-wide cost savings if Amazon does it once, and bakes it into it’s services. Sure the little guy doesn’t want to pay for it. But Amazon ask yourself if you want to have to write another letter like this. And maybe enough big guys will come sniffing around once you add it to the sales literature, to offset those admittedly significant development and ongoing increased resource utilization costs.

UPS pulls an Amazon

Got this message for a package I am tracking today, “Due to severe thunderstorms in Louisville, KY (our major air hub), UPS Next Day Air Early A.M., UPS Next Day Air, and International Express delivery times will be delayed today” … “ for delivery throughout the United States.”

Folks that’s called a single point of failure. That’s called a lack of redundancy, and it’s called no geographical fault tolerance.

It’s just like Amazon last week, got all these poor websites run through a single datacenter. C’mon we knew better than that a decade ago.

Spend the money, have two or three. It’s not optional. Do it right, make them hot-hot.

Tablets = Convenience

Dunno why this never occurred to me before. I guess I spend so much time trying to push the characterization that tablets are  “content consumption devices” rather than content creation devices down everyone’s throat that the simpler truth got by me.

What I mean is, there’s not a single thing you do on a tablet (consuming all that content) that you can’t do on both your PC and your smartphone. So why do we need the tablet? It fits in a convenience niche. Where the smartphone is a little too small, and the laptop a little too unwieldy, and the e-ink device a little too single-purpose, that’s where the tablet comes in.

You’re in the kitchen using it for recipes, then you carry it with you to the dining room where maybe you use it to read some newspapers with your food. Next it’s to the living room where you look up songs from your favorite TV show, or read the latest bestseller during commercials or even pull up a Netflix movie (with headphones) while the kids are watching Disney channel. In between all these things you’re keeping up with Facebook and Twitter and the latest news via the web.

There’s nothing the tablet does, that we don’t already have. But it make enough things easier and better, to create a value proposition that is selling millions of devices a year.

Watching multiple streams on Netflix

I did not know this, but it sounds like if you have the streaming only Netflix plan, you can only watch 1 stream at a time, whereas if you have a DVD plan, you can watch as many streams as the number of DVDs you can have out.

This becomes interesting if you have more than 1 way to watch Netflix streams. For instance the kids can watch a Netflix movie on the TV via the Wii, while Mom watches a Netflix TV show on the iPad in the bedroom. Meanwhile Dad watches a Netflix movie on his iPhone while traveling for business, all at the same time.

http://gigaom.com/video/netflix-multiple-streams-family-plans/

Sync-able iOS savegames

Anybody else out there have an iphone and an ipad? How cool is it to start reading a book on Amazon's Kindle app on the iPad in your living room, and then pick back up on the page you were on, from your iPhone, later while standing in line at the grocery store? It's awesome!

How annoying and aggravating it is then, to make some serious progress in Angry Birds or some other great i-game, but then to be unable to continue the same session on your other device?