Everything fails occassionally. Amazon probably has a team of highly specialized engineers on the task right now, working under the pressure of a few dozen disgruntled customers and under the eyes of worldwide press.
Could your company respond with an equal intensity if this was your own hardware? Will your SAN supplier whip his staff on-site as fast as they will for amazon?
I wish I could use that line to explain to my company why our business has come to a complete halt.
Granted, your business is completely web-based and in the cloud, which is why I specifically made a mention to system admins why the cloud is not reliable enough to be a high-level tier of storage yet. Why doesn't that make sense? I wasn't trying to offend you or your decisions.
Also, yes, my company and my SAN supplier would have staff on-site. But we have control over our own hardware, so there's really no comparison.
I wish I could use that line to explain to my company why our business has come to a complete halt.
It's a completely valid and reasonable business decision.
For most companies the risk of amazon downtime is simply not a deciding factor when held against what it would cost to maintain an own datacenter with remotely similar properties.
a high-level tier of storage yet. Why doesn't that make sense?
I guess I didn't get what you mean by "high-level tier storage"? Most companies have at most two tiers: Live and Snapshot-Backup. If you're a bank or fortune XXX with truly multi-tiered storage then yes, your inhouse staff might be able to do it better. But it will probably cost quite a bit more than ec2 and the business case for that is imho rather the exception than the rule.
But we have control over our own hardware, so there's really no comparison.
Well, I think you overestimate your capabilities there (unless you are a fortune 500). Amazon doesn't face downtimes over disk or server failures - and neither would you. The real question is who can debug and resolve complicated failure modes faster (you know, nasty stuff, heisenbugs).
Not meaning to offend you either but my money would be on amazon. That's why I questioned your broad statement of "not a high-level tier storage". How much higher level than backed by a 50.000-servers operation can it get?
I completely agree with your points. Again, I was speaking to people who manage their own SANs, and may be looking to use the Cloud as an additional tier of storage, with the same reliability as a local array. Reliable in the sense that they would never have to worry about Internet latency, network nodes going down, or anything else that they have absolutely no knowledge or control over and could potentially affect the performance/operation of an application, ultimately disabling me from meeting business requirements.
If there are no business requirements to meet, I have no arguments, the Cloud is where I'm at!
Basically, Bitbucket is having some downtime because of Amazon. But if it wasn't Amazon, it could be something else -- failing hardware, earthquakes, disgruntled datacenter employees, whatever. At least the Bitbucket folks can theoretically sit back and relax while Someone Else fixes this (rare) hardware problem.
To be fair, cloud storage is a huge step up in terms of reliability for small to medium size startups where the capital necessary to roll out their own hardware and people necessary to maintain that hardware is not within their budget. A lot of startups resort to very risky setups because they can't afford increased reliability, and Amazon and Rackspace seem to solve that problem. For a larger company, it makes more sense to expend capital on reliability because they can afford it and they want to hold the ax when something bad occurs.
