AWS Disruption - Cloud Concerns Re-debated

In August of 2006, Amazon launched EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud - a service that allowed for the first realization of the 4 tenets of cloud computing at the Infrastructure layer. - On demand elastic compute power was available on a pay per usage model. Developers and Enterprises could host applications by themselves and also program them to take advantage of the underlying infrastructure that could scale up and down with a call to exposed APIs by Amazon. 

Architected, designed and rolled out from CapeTown, South Africa, 5 years ago, AWS ran into its first major battle this week with a major disruption at a datacenter in Northern Virginia. 

1. With major customers like NASDAQ, NetFlix, FourSquare, Pfizer, NewYorkTimes, this disruption brings to the forefront the debate on what should enterprises keep in house versus putting them on 3rd party provided infrastructure like AWS EC2. 
2. It also will result in enterprises revisiting their strategy on 3rd party infrastructure. Enterprises like NetFlix that hosted from multiple datacenter locations of AWS did not face disruptions while SMBs who opted for single data center hosting faced the brunt.
3. A definitive 3rd angle to be discussed would be on "Should we go with one provider or distribute our bets with multiple?

Occurrences of this nature do help both consumers and providers a chance to tighten their belts. A bane in the short term but a boon in the long term.

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