Amazon sorry for outage, offers credits
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided on Friday its post-mortem on its outage that stretched for more than a day. While the apology and recap of events is notable, the biggest takeaway is that Amazon promises to communicate better, and be more transparent in the future.
"If we've learned anything from the spate of outages recently, communication is everything," AWS said in a statement on Friday, adding that it has gleaned more than just technical know-how from the outage.
"In addition to the technical insights and improvements that will result from this event, we also identified improvements that need to be made in our customer communications. We would like our communications to be more frequent and contain more information," AWS said in a statement on Friday.
"We understand that during an outage, customers want to know as many details as possible about what's going on, how long it will take to fix, and what we are doing so that it doesn't happen again," AWS added.
Most of the AWS leadership team also pitched in to help fix the problem and refrained from initial speculation to focus on a fix.
"We updated customers when we had new information that we felt confident was accurate and refrained from speculating, knowing that once we had returned the services back to health that we would quickly transition to the data collection and analysis stage that would drive this post-mortem," AWS said, adding that it will endeavour to improve its communications with customers going forwards.
"That said, we think we can improve in this area. We switched to more regular updates part of the way through this event and plan to continue with similar frequency of updates in the future. In addition, we are already working on how we can staff our developer support team more expansively in an event such as this, and organise to provide early and meaningful information, while still avoiding speculation."
Amazon is providing a 10-day credit for 100 per cent usage for elastic block stores (EBS) as compensation for those affected by the outage.
As for the post-mortem, AWS has provided a lot of detail. The cascading effects of the network outage are worth the read.
Luke Hopewell also contributed to this article.
Via ZDNet US