Tag Archives: web service

Amazon’s Cloud Service Faces Outage, Does This Mean Cloud Service In General Isn’t That Reliable?

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Posted by on in Amazon, Web Services

The never ending battle between an administrator and his or her servers in small scale network is already an endless nightmare, but for huge companies with so much at stake to keep their websites responsive — even a shortest duration of a downtime will be too bitter to swallow.  Popular websites such as Reddit have faced this very problem when their service provider Amazon has tried hard to bring servers/services back online.

Amazon is one of those leading cloud providers.  Everyone is leaning toward cloud providers nowadays, because these cloud providers boast many advantages.  Cloud providers insist that their network environments allow faster deployments of services.   Companies need to worry less in the department of keeping servers up and running — little overhead in planning of the physical structure of their networks.  Often, cloud providers insist others that they could save companies from spending too much — providing that cloud providers provide affordable pay as you go fee structure and necessary equipments.  Cloud providers often suggest their network environments potentially have had the highest redundancies (e.g., uptime, data retention, so on), but as we see nothing could last forever as Amazon (one of the biggest cloud providers) scrambles to stop their current service outage.

Nothing could last forever phrase clarifies the meaning that even the cloud is not able to guarantee forever uptime, 100% data retention, and so on.  Still, it’s true that a network environment of a cloud does provide more redundancies in many facets of running a network, therefore it should provide better uptime and more.  In Amazon case, I can only surmise that perhaps too many huge and popular websites utilize Amazon’s cloud service and place too much stress onto Amazon’s cloud network and resources.  Amazon’s cloud is one of the biggest out there, but if Amazon fails to keep the uptime stays high — we can only say even the biggest cloud may not be able to handle the demands of the real world.

My earnest opinion is that not to place all of your eggs in one basket when it comes down to ensuring the continuity of a high uptime for a major busy website.  It’s best to utilize the cloud in conjunction with another private physical network where it could be the backup service when the cloud has gone down for maintenance.  Since the cloud is the true force behind the uptime of a major busy website, then the private physical network doesn’t have to be expensive and big and scalable.  After all, the physical private network is only there 1% of the time to uphold the high availability appearance of a particular important website.  We can blame Amazon in anyway, but in the end of the day Amazon is still providing a cloud service that inherently carries superior advantages over traditional network environment in term of it’s better for some companies to utilize the cloud than anything else.  The same can be said for many other excellent cloud service providers.  In the end, any company can create their own cloud and reap the benefits of their own structure and efforts.

Source:  http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216083/
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Amazon Revamps S3 To Allow Hosting Simple Static Websites Easier

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Posted by on in Amazon, Internet, Web Services

Before now, hosting static websites and contents on Amazon S3 required you to jump hoops of technicalities, but now Amazon makes it easy for you to create simple static websites using Amazon S3.  You can use Amazon AWS Management Console to manage your simple static website configuration without writing complicated codes.  According to Amazon, two new features that have been added to the revamping of Amazon S3, index document support and error document support, make the process of creating simple static websites on Amazon S3 easier.  To read more about the new exciting features and possibilities of Amazon S3, please go to here.

For your information:  In case the people who have no idea what are Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3, I can tell you that these Amazon services are cloud base services.  Wikipedia has a better explanation than I could give about cloud computing (i.e., cloud base services), and so here is the link to cloud computing on Wikipedia.  Cloud computing is hype as it promises redundancy for data (i.e., better data retention) and cheaper costs.  Personally, I think small business owners will not benefit from cloud base services as it’s not necessary true that it’s cheaper to use cloud base services in small scale.