A number of Amazon's AWS services suffered a massive outage earlier today. For some customers, the S3 data storage service was unavailable for hours.
The forum thread where this drama played out makes for some interesting reading. Most notable is the ongoing clamour of users for information from Amazon staff about the issue, and the sparsity of official feedback during the crisis.
This thread highlights an important shortcoming of the AWS offering, quite apart from the outage itself. Amazon does not offer a central web page location that gives the current status of AWS services, nor is there any other kind of notification mechanism to let users know if the services are struggling and what Amazon is doing in response. Once users notice a fault, they must visit the developer discussion forums to see whether the fault is unique to them, to notify Amazon staffers of their issue, and to seek feedback.
For infrastructure services that are a vital component of many businesses, a discussion forum is in no way a sufficient communication channel for fault notifications and tracking. Especially as users were locked out of the forums themselves for a period during the outage.
Amazon needs to do better.
Update
It looks like Amazon have recognized that their forums are an inadequate fault notification and monitoring system, and they have started work on an alternative. From the forum:
Additionally, we’ve begun work on a service health dashboard, and expect to release that shortly.
Details are scarce, but this is a promising development.
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