Amazon’s cloud platform suffered a brief service outage earlier this week when a lightning strike in Dublin impacted its power systems. The outage affected customers with Web-facing products such as Layar and Foursquare, as Amazon worked to restore its servers and get its cloud up and running again.
Such instances give businesses pause when they consider moving their critical applications to a cloud service. But the reality of the matter is that Amazon’s services still include SLAs for 99 per cent up time, and these sort of disruptions are few and far between – after all, lightning rarely strikes in the same place twice. Even companies like Oracle Corp. are demonstrating faith in Amazon’s reliability, having given its customers the options to install database programs to the cloud two years ago.
Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president of server technologies at Oracle talks about the enterprise software company’s partnership with Amazon. It allows customers to install Oracle software on Amazon’s cloud environment rather than servers on-premises. “We try to make it as simple and easy as possible to do,” he said in this February 2009 video.