Readers Not Fazed By Amazon Cloud Outage

A well-publicised outage at the market-leading Amazon EC2 service appears to have had little or no effect on eWEEK readers’ plans for cloud adoption.

When a data centre running Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) had a partial failure, several social startups including HootSuite, Foursquare and Reddit were affected, some of them for days. Commentators said the incident at the provider, which is the market leader in cloud services, would taint cloud for some time – as trust has been singled out as a major problem for cloud services.

One service failure makes no difference

But, to our surprise, that seems not to be the case. In a survey of eWEEK readers, nearly 80 percent said it would make no difference at all to their plans.

Of those, 37 percent had not even heard of the problem, which we found a bit disappointing. Don’t you even read our site?

A large group (29 percent) did not have their opinions changed by the outage, since they already plan to avoid the cloud, possibly for reasons of trust, or maybe other issues such as regulations.

Perhaps surprisingly, a sizeable fraction (13 percent) said the problem would not affect their support for the cloud, which would continue. Perhaps this group read further into the story, and realised that the startups may have been partly to blame for their problems – any cloud service should be backed up, and Amazon’s offerings include higher-reliability options.

Sixteen percent of you have had your opinions of the cloud changed by the incident. One respondent in the ‘other’ category said they would “not put all my eggs in one basket”. Meanwhile, eight percent of you will be looking at other cloud providers – which may be good news for choice in the market, as Amazon’s dominance is currently very strong.

“In cloud services, if Amazon is Coke, there is no Pepsi,” said analyst William Fellows of the 451  at the recent Cloud Expo Europe in London.

What do you look for in a server?

For our next poll, we’re getting physical again. We want you to tell us what you look for in a server. Do you like to have low cost above everything, low total cost of ownership, or reliability? Or, be honest, do you just choose a brand you trust?

Alternatively you may be locked into a particular hardware model, or need software compatibility.

Or, since we know some of you like the cloud, maybe your ideal server is no longer a box in a room, but a virtual machine somewhere else.

If you make your choice based on other things, like the colour of the plastic on the front, you will have to use the “Other” option to let us know.