It happened again… this was the second AWS outage in the same month. Did you fail to protect your service online? Don’t forget – you can’t pass your liability onto your IaaS vendor.

You can find a great amount of knowledge resources with regards to AWS cloud High Availability architectures in Newvem’s resources center, starting from Best Practice for High Availability Deployment all the way to knowing more about how to maintain availability for your specific environment, such as how to maintain a failover to MSSQL DB server, or a case study on how to replicate PostgreSQL DB Between AWS Regions.

I also strongly suggest you to check out some important presentations, such as Architecture Blueprints for achieving High Availability in AWS or 10 Cloud Design Patterns, which explain how to spot and prevent single point of failures (SPOF). I realize that some will say these presentations are a bit old, but considering the great amount of sites that were down I suspect that we are still not ready for the next outage. This premise is supported by our Cloud radar findings:

“It is surprising to see that a significant amount of AWS users are aware of the benefits of ELB, yet not familiar with the inherent opportunity to increase availability by using ELB across multiple availability zones.” Check our AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) usage patterns analysis

I assume that if you read these lines you probably had some issues with your online service. Hold on – don’t rush to fix things and invest your time and money on improving your environment. Do you remember the cloud optimization cycle? First analyze your AWS deployment, identify and understand your point of failures, and only then take action – and don’t forget to analyze again to validate the improvement. The cloud comes with great benefits but outages will happen again.

Learn more on How to prepare for & protect against damage from AWS Cloud Outages

Keywords: Amazon Cloud Computing, AWS Cloud, Cloud services, ELB, High Availability, Elastic Load Balancer, Cloud outage, Architecture, Deployment, Design, best practices