14 December 2021 (Crete, Greece) — Later this week I will post “Why every move Amazon makes has such ripple effects well beyond the retail space” (the first of my two end-of-the-year “TL;DR” magnum opuses) but herein a few brief thoughts on the Amazon outage last week.
Here’s the fix for the Amazon AWS outage: an updated status page wherein Amazon itself reports “Amazon Web Services Explains Outage and Will Make It Easier to Track Future Ones” :
A major Amazon Web Services outage on Tuesday started after network devices got overloaded, the company said on Friday [December 10, 2021] . Amazon ran into issues updating the public and taking support inquiries, and now will revamp those systems.
Several questions naturally arise:
1. How are those technical methods working out?
2. What about automatic regional load balancing and redundancy?
3. What is up with replicating the mainframe single point of failure in a cloudy world?
Neither the write up nor Amazon have answers. But just a few thoughts, however, amongst the cobwebs of my mind. Monopolies see efficiency arising from:
• Streamlining by shifting human intermediated work to smart software which sort of works until it does not.
• Talking about technical prowess via marketing centric content and letting the engineering sort of muddle along until it eventually, if ever, catches up to the Mad Ave prose, PowerPoints, and rah rah speeches at bespoke conferences
• Cutting costs where one can; for example, robust network devices and infrastructure.
The AT&T approach is a goner, but yet it seems to be back, just in the form of Baby Bell thinking applied to an online bookstore which dabbles in national security systems and methods, selling third party products with mysterious origins, and promoting audio books to those who have cancelled the service due to endless email promotions.
Yep, outstanding, just from Wall Street’s point of view. From my vantage point, another sign of deep seated issues. What outfit is up next? Google, Microsoft, or some back office provider of which most humans have never heard?
The new and improved approach to an AT&T type business is just juicy with wonderfulness. Until not.
Oh, just a start. There is so much to say about Amazon. Stay tuned.