Analysts and experts said the complexity of Amazon’s cloud was a major cause of Tuesday’s outage.
Another factor has to do with the cheapness of its web services, which allow customers to store information in its cloud for relatively little money. Amazon’s cloud complexity, according to experts, makes it difficult to create backup plans for customers.
On this topic, Naveen Chhabra, senior analyst at the research firm Forrester, explained that Amazon Web Services consists of hundreds of different services, from basic building blocks such as computing power and storage space to advanced services such as high-speed databases and AI in education. He noted that it is difficult to create backups on other cloud providers because some services are proprietary to AWS, while some work differently on another server.
Amazon, too, uses a tactic that makes it harder for customers to have their data on other cloud servers. Although it is cheap to store data in its cloud, it is difficult for companies to retrieve data and have it in another cloud. Matthew Prince, head of Internet security firm Cloudflare, noted in his statement, “That amplifies issues like this (outage) when they happen. A more resilient cloud is one where egress fees are eliminated and customers can be multi-cloud. I think that would actually increase the faith customers have in the cloud.”
For more information, read the original story in Reuters.
