Tech Community Still Fear Possible Amazon Cloud Failures

The tech community is still wary of overreliance on the Amazon cloud platform, with experts warning of potential havoc in the event of AWS systems going down.

This article published by Financial News this week sparked a debate where tech experts expressed their fears about depending on Amazon Web Services platform for their cloud needs. Hacker News is the discussion form of Y Combinator, the biggest startup accelerator in the United States.

Which has backed companies like Dropbox and Airbnb.

Anyway, the getting back to AWS, it has now become the predominant cloud provider on the planet, with many thinking of it as too big to fail.

But as one person put it:

“If you wanted to blow something up to make the west suffer, an AWS data center would probably be a pretty good target. I wonder at what point that becomes a legitimate national security concern.”

Another one:

“If AWS went down hard, it would be more than just ‘I can’t watch Netflix’. Some people wouldn’t be able to do their computer work, send receive emails, others might not receive their paychecks or be able to pay bills.”

The community has expressed caution over how much of their data and systems functionality is reliant on AWS related services. A huge number of absolutely government, financial and education organizations have a vital reliance on Amazon Web Services.

Amazon, for its part, insists that its services are safe.

Gavin Jackson, head of Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Amazon Web Services assures that AWS has multiple datacenters in multiple countries and regions across the world, which clients can use to replicate data to ensure its safety:

“I can pretty confidently say that I don’t think that there’s any other company on the planet that has as many people thinking about security every day.”

But nothing is immune to outages, as the recent AWS S3 outage in February this year showed.

It took down a number of websites, including the likes of Business Insider, Medium, Quora, and even the AWS dashboard, for a several hours. Imagine the kinds of troubles that a similar mega scale outage could cause.

With clients like Netflix, Nasdaq, 100% of the Fortune 50 companies, the UK Financial Conduct Authority, as well as banking giants like Citigroup, JPMorgan and HSBC.

Let’s just hope security and reliability remain the top two priorities at AWS for all time.