Comment to: "No excuse: Storms should not take down your cloud"

Interesting points by David Linthicum (@davidlinthicum) in the post No excuse: Storms should not take down your cloud on InfoWorld. Also a lot of interesting comments. Both agree and disagree so I commented it.

Short break out from the post:

"Despite the terrible weather, Amazon.com had no legitimate excuse for the outage. After all, most other cloud providers in the area were able to continue service. Powerful storms are not exactly an uncommon phenomenon in the mid-Atlantic region, so the data center should have been designed and run accordingly. 

The people at any cloud provider need to drill fail-over scenarios and make sure the right mechanisms are in place for power loss and other normal consequences of weather, wherever they are located. The loss of power should never interrupt service."

My comment:

"I'm not up to date with the AWS outage since I was on a vacation (rainy, windy and stormy most of the time) so I'm not going to discuss facts. I agree and not agree to the post and some of the comments. But, if Amazon was the only one with problem, or long lasting outage, something's wrong and not ok with the way of producing and provide the services. Intention of cloud services must be to provide HA with high SLA. Though, in general; there must be a room for outage and in emergency force majeure. Far more complicated situations than storms might, can and will happen in the future. Isn't it obvious and fundamental why a SLA isn't promised to 100%? No one wants to pay for it (even though customers expect it - it's not the same thing) and no one want to guarantee it. It's not ok with outages each and every day/week/month but penalties should exist and don't forget; it's a free market - go to another provider if it doesn't work ok and is reliable. Never the less; Amazon should of course feel ashamed and maybe check their DR and HA solutions. And, as David says, a storm should normally not be a legitimated reason for outages."