Dark “Clouds” Forming After Netflix Outage Blamed On Amazon

December 26, 2012 4:00 AM

By KYW tech editor Ian Bush

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – From Christmas Eve through noon on Christmas Day, Netflix customers couldn’t watch any TV shows or movies on the service (see related story).

It’s an inconvenience for subscribers, but a major problem for businesses that trust other companies to store and deliver data.

You can get most anything from Amazon — including cloud storage.

“Amazon has a bunch of big, huge server farms,” says Barb Darrow, senior writer at the tech site GigaOM.com.

Darrow says companies like Netflix let cloud providers like Amazon do the data dirty work — the expensive, taxing task of serving up whatever information the rest of us on the Internet are asking for.

Over the holiday, a glitch at Amazon’s facility in suburban Washington, DC left Netflix users with nothing on their screens.

“Part of the reason is that it’s the largest and oldest of Amazon data centres  and it’s also the data centre on which Amazon deploys new services first,” Darrow says. “While companies are supposed to be dividing their workloads among different data centers, sometimes you don’t have the choice because you’re using a new service that is available only from Amazon US-East.”

An outage there in October affected sites and services like Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit, and FourSquare. Darrow says such issues are a PR problem for cloud providers like Amazon, and worse for companies who have no control over what’s happening.

“Especially because Amazon is really wanting businesses to let them handle more of their mission-critical workload. It’s one thing for an online video site to go out — it’s an inconvenience and a pain. But if it’s a business database or accounting system, that’s a whole other issue. Things like this will spook CEOs going forward. Because this gets huge coverage. If I’m a CIO, and I want to go to Amazon, my boss is going to say, ‘isn’t that the cloud that went out over Christams eve?’”

It’s not just Amazon. Google, HP, Microsoft, and Rackspace are among other cloud providers that have to balance size with service — where even a momentary outage can mean a business’s worst nightmare.

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2012/12/26/dark-clouds-forming-after-netflix-outage-blamed-on-amazon/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car Stealer's Wheel? Seattle police department quotes "Watchmen" movie in a recap of the recent arrest. Tech Culture by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper December 4, 2016 5:00 PM PST It's maybe the most satisfying arrest we can imagine. Seattle police caught an alleged car thief by enlisting the help of car maker BMW to both track and then remotely lock the luckless criminal in the very car he was trying to steal. Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, deputy director of communications for the Seattle Police Department, posted a witty summary of the event on the SPD's blog on Wednesday. Turns out if you're inside a stolen car, it's perhaps not the best time to take a nap. "A car thief awoke from a sound slumber Sunday morning (Nov. 27) to find he had been remotely locked inside a stolen BMW, just as Seattle police officers were bearing down on him," Spangenthal-Lee wrote. The suspect found a ke...
Read more

Report: World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China

World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China Published time: 17 Mar, 2019 13:12 ·           A Chinese surgeon has performed the world’s first remote brain surgery using 5G technology, with the patient 3,000km away from the operating doctor. Dr. Ling Zhipei remotely implanted a neurostimulator into his patient’s brain on Saturday, Chinese state-run media  reports . The surgeon manipulated the instruments in the Beijing-based PLAGH hospital from a clinic subsidiary on the southern Hainan island, located 3,000km away. The surgery is said to have lasted three hours and ended successfully. The patient, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, is said to be feeling well after the pioneering operation. The doctor used a computer connected to the next-generation 5G network developed by Chinese tech giant Huawei. The new device enabled a near real-time connection, according to Dr. Ling.  “You barely feel that th...
Read more

New ATM's: withdraw money with veins in your finger

New cash machines: withdraw money with veins in your finger Cash machine technology that reads the pattern of finger veins is already available in Japan and Poland   By Telegraph Reporters 6:59PM BST 15 May 2014 Cash machines could soon be installed with devices that identify customers by reading the veins in their fingers. The technology is already being rolled out in Poland, where 1,730 cash machines will this year be installed with readers, negating the need for a debit card and Pin. Developed by Hitachi, the Japanese electronics firm, the machines read the patterns of the veins just below the surface of the skin on your finger using infra-red sensors. The light is partially absorbed by haemoglobin in the veins to capture a unique finger vein pattern profile, which is matched to a profile. The technology is used by Japanese banks and also in Turkey, offering “groundbreaking levels of accuracy and speed of authentication”, Hitachi said, which in t...
Read more