Predictably, the reaction to this week’s Amazon Web Services (AWS), outage that brought down several high-profile Web sites was harsh. Many pundits warned businesses against putting all their eggs in one basket.
Vice, for example, contributed the article “AWS is the Internet’s Single Biggest Point of Failure”
Amazon Web Service’s outage last week has shown the world how dependent it is, and why that’s a bad thing.
Quartz published an article on the same theme entitled “The AWS Outage Shows the Internet Depends Too Much on Amazon.” However, the listing in Google News actually brought up an Article with the headline “A total Amazon Cloud Outage would be the closest thing the world going offline.” It all starts with:
If you are unsure about how Amazon controls our lives beyond what we buy, then look at the spiraling effects that an Amazon Web Services (AWS), outage on December 7th caused. Everything from banking apps to home delivery to Christmas lights went out of control.
There’s also the article on mynorthwest.com entitled “Ross AWS outage a reminder how much control have we given up to technology.” It contains the following:
It is a reminder that the more you give up control to a central technology, the more helpless it will make you when it fails. It is obvious that power-hungry tyrants would love to see us fail. But, mistakes like this are a sign that it would be too easy for them.
The Christian Science Monitor joined the fray with the article “Amazon Outage emphasizes weak links of internet concentration.” It states:
Carl Malamud is a technologist and activist for public data access. The AWS outage shows how Big Tech has distorted the internet. It was originally designed to be a distributed, decentralized network that could withstand mass disasters like nuclear attack.
There are many more, but you get it.
Legislators are increasingly scrutinizing “Big Tech,” as described in a last summer’s article in The New York Times entitled “Lawmakers, Taking aim at Big Tech, Push for sweeping overhaul of antitrust.” It reports that five bills were introduced by a bipartisan group of House lawmakers targeting Amazon, Apple and Google. This week’s AWS Outage and the resulting backlash might give politicians more ammunition and impetus for dismantling AWS and other large cloud and tech companies.
Be aware that while you may now be able to enjoy the “we take over everything” one-stop-shop experience from your cloud provider or other large tech vendor, you might want more information on how to integrate discrete providers into your IT systems in order to attain that level of satisfaction.
Jeff Bezos and other high-tech executives might still be flying around on spaceships.