Power disruption at one of Amazon's EC2 data center

One of the data centers hosting Amazon's EC2 Cloud service experienced problems mid-week that resulted in some operations being interrupted. A one-line status report on Amazon's Service Health Dashboard stated tersely that "We are experiencing power issues for a subset of instances" at 4:26 am Eastern, or 18 minutes after connectivity issues were first announced.

Subsequent updates made references to how computing "instances" were being restored, presumably due to them failing as a result of the power issue. At 9:41 am all jobs were reported to have been recovered. According to InformationWeek, an Amazon public relations representatives did not immediately respond to a request for information.

As the number of cloud services increase and come online through 2010, it can only be expected that greater scrutiny than ever will be focused on the top cloud platforms. Unfortunately, until standard techniques and tools are created, platforms such as Amazon's EC2 essentially operate as black boxes, where it is hard to determine the problems externally.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek

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