Storm Warning: Why 100% Cloud Uptime Is Impossible

Mike Pav | ReadWrite | February 11, 2013

When Amazon Web Services crashed on Christmas Eve (which brought down Netflix among other high-profile sites), Amazon offered this explanation: its elastic load balancers failed. Load balancers, as the name implies, distribute the network's workload. Among their most important functions is protecting the system's components from becoming overburdened and shutting down. 

After Amazon's outage, the Web became a virtual fount of suggestions for avoiding more such glitches. Some said Amazon's cloud customers should write their own load balancers. Others said service providers like Netflix should deploy multiple data centers as insurance against another PaaS failure...