Yesterday’s AWS outage showed how important it is to understand the technologies that power the infrastructure for the business services we use the most. This outage managed to bring down a significant portion of the Internet, including major online games, social media apps, and even medical software infrastructure that depends on AWS. The impact of this outage could reach into the billions of dollars when all the dust has settled. I started to get many calls from my friends and clients when their favorite services stopped working out of the blue. That’s why I have decided to explain how cloud services work on the backend in more detail.
As per Forbes: “The financial toll of such events is immense. Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, told that the financial impact of the outage could "easily reach into the hundreds of billions" due to lost productivity and halted business operations. For an industry that measures success in milliseconds and relies on uninterrupted global connectivity, even an eight-hour disruption is catastrophic.
How AWS Cloud Works
Arguably Amazon holds the title of being the first cloud provider. This entire industry was created by Amazon engineers looking to maximize server usage. The traditional web hosting model required renting a server for an entire month. That meant you couldn’t scale when traffic grew, and you couldn’t save money when traffic shrank. Instead of paying every month to access a server, cloud platforms let you pay for every minute of server time you use. The Amazon cloud uses small, lightweight virtual servers called containers to host many different web services on the same physical server. However, that makes cloud services much more complicated to handle. With containers, you also need software to manage and “orchestrate” them. You need complicated networking software to allow you to move containers from one physical hardware to another. That is how Amazon can transfer all your data from one physical datacenter to another on the other side of the world.
As a longtime PMP and former Microsoft MVP, I’ve seen both platforms evolve. The latest AWS outage highlights fundamental architectural and operational differences between Amazon’s and Microsoft’s approaches to cloud resilience.
Outage Lessons. How Microsoft’s Cloud Philosophy Differs from Amazon’s
Before cloud computing existed, Microsoft was the major provider of enterprise Internet software and services. Tools like Microsoft SQL Server, IIS Web Server, and Windows Server were critical for the pre-cloud enterprise world. Azure differs from AWS because Microsoft already had a successful enterprise web services division before it got into cloud computing. Microsoft changed many of its enterprise tools to be compatible with containers and cloud computing. Since Microsoft is primarily a software company, you still get the flexibility to use your own hardware. The Windows operating system is also used extensively as a backend platform for Microsoft’s cloud offerings. This allows companies to use preexisting business productivity tools.
Hopefully, this short guide has explained the complexity that drives major cloud failures you see today and in the future.
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