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It’s that time of the year again, top N lists are popping up everywhere, I found this list from Data Center Knowledge to be interesting.

Of note, two big cloud companies were on the list with multiple outages – Amazon having at least three outages and Azure right behind it at two. Outages have been a blight on both services for years.

I don’t know about you, but short of a brief time at a poor hosting facility in Seattle (I joined a company in Spring of 2006 that was hosted there and we were moved out by Fall of 2006 – we did go through one power outage while I was there if I recall right), the number of infrastructure related outages I’ve been through over the past decade have been fairly minimal compared to the number experienced by these cloud companies. The number of application related outages (and total downtime minutes incurred by said applications) out numbers infrastructure related things for me I’d say by at least 1,000:1.

Amazon has had far more downtime for companies that I have worked for (either before or since I was there) than any infrastructure related outages at companies I was at where they hosted their own stuff. I’d say it’s safe to say an order of magnitude more outages. Of course not all of these are called outages by Amazon, they leave themselves enough wiggle room to drive an aircraft carrier through in their SLAs. My favorite one was probably the forced reboot of their entire infrastructure.

Unlike infrastructure related outages at individual companies, obviously these large service provider outages have much larger consequences for very large numbers of customers.

Speaking of cloud, I heard that HP brought their own cloud platform out of beta recently. I am not a fan of this cloud either, basically they tried to clone what Amazon is doing in their cloud, which infrastructure wise is a totally 1990s way of doing things (with APIs on top to make it feel nice). Wake me up when these clouds get the ability to pool CPU/memory/storage and have the ability to dynamically configure systems without fixed configurations.

If the world happens to continue on after December 22nd @ 3:11AM Pacific time, and I don’t happen to see you before Christmas – have a good holiday from all of us monkeys at Techopsguys.