Mass Cloud Provider, causes Mass Confusion in the Mass Market! 

Yes, on Tuesday 28th February, Amazon Web Services suffered the most catastrophic outage to date, knocking off scores off services globally.

There are already plenty of posts about:

• What went wrong technically
• Methods of prevention
• Impact on the market

However, I cannot see much about what happened during the actual event on the ground and after years of having to pick up the phone to a “down” customer, it is a topic that needs addressing.

So what happens during a technical crisis? Business panic, people start scrambling for hierarchy and the very last thing anyone wants is silence. Ironically as talked about, the AWS Status board also went off during this event, which would have been akin to chaos

Nature would dictate that during crisis, humans almost immediately search for information and the most natural medium is conversation. For the hundred of thousands of direct AWS that only had email support access (Basic & Developer at the time of writing), it must have felt hopeless.

Speaking to Business level customer post the event, the main comment was you were merely calling into to a shared resource/pool of people who held no specific information relevant to why your solution was offline, only that it was. That was if you got through given the resources were stretched thin.

So why go through old pains? As most businesses know, you need to learn from them to really understand the pain and in this case, communication was the main source of it.

The main reason for the emergence of “wrapper” services around the Hyperscalers was to fill this void in communication and provide a shield around events like this. Yes they would still not be able to tell you exactly what was going on, but you had a named person, who understands your situation (most likely would have spoken to you before) saying “Let me handle it from here”. In a crisis that can be priceless.

The developer can report to their boss someone is on it, the boss has a named person to shout at and the wider business can say they have an open communication line – all reliefs during events like this.

Hosting providers have access to dedicated teams or at the very least priority channels to keep you updated, with some doing this proactively. Yes they will also face stress in times of crisis but having a point of contact will also makes things less stressful.

As more and more businesses strive for cost savings and technical efficiencies, I personally think they are starting to forget the reason the tertiary industry evolved in the first place. The need for service. Service is the separator between a thing and something. You can put your code in the “cloud” or you can be rest assured that Gary from Cloud Service Inc has you covered.

I hope that this event will remind businesses worldwide the critical value of communication during crisis and plan for the future. Unless you are Enterprise level, you cannot just go and have a “post event” meeting with Amazon but you definitely can ask your Hosting provider to come visit you.

Root Provider is more than happy to advise on how you can rework your hosting communications plan and would advise you start with one of our partners Rackspace, who at time of writing provide the widest coverage in terms of hyperscaler reach.

Let’s keep talking!