Last month’s EC2 outage at Amazon prompted a lot of scaremongering around cloud computing’s readiness for prime-time, and a lot of (justified) reflection on the merits of current cloud service-level agreements (SLAs). A network configuration change caused problems for EC2’s Northern Virginia data center, impacting availability of sites like Foursquare and Reddit. Other EC2 users, like Netflix, with backup server instances in other ‘availability zones’ were able to ride out the storm and continue to provide service. Read more »