It’s not Amazon’s fault. On Sunday, September 20, 2015, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage. With an increasing number of companies running mission-critical workloads on AWS—even their core customer-facing services—an AWS outage can result in far-reaching subsequent system outages. In this instance, Netflix, Airbnb, Nest, IMDb, and more all experienced downtime, impacting their customers and ultimately their business’s bottom lines. The core outage lasted about five hours (or more, depending on how you count), resulting in even longer outages for the affected AWS customers before their systems recovered from the failure.
If you’re Nest, you’re paying AWS because you want to focus on creating value for your customers, not on infrastructure concerns. As part of the deal, AWS is responsible for keeping its systems up, and enabling you to keep yours functioning as well. If AWS experiences downtime, it’d be easy to blame Amazon for your resulting outage.
But you’d be wrong. Amazon isn’t to blame for your outage.
Wait! Don’t toss this book to the side. Please hear me out. My assertion gets right to the heart of the matter and explains the goals of this book.