CIO Magazine: Amazon’s Data Center Outage Reads Like a Thriller

Computerworld — When an Amazon Web Services data center lost power early Wednesday, the company wrote about the unfolding event with the brevity and tension of one its bestselling pot boilers.

Our anonymous author, who we’ll call Sysadmin, begins his story simply, without emotional complications and love interests.

“We are investigating connectivity issues for instances in the US-EAST-1 region,” Sysadmin writes on Amazon’s operations status board at 1:08 a.m. PT.

With one sentence, we’re intrigued. Something’s up with Amazon’s data center in Northern Virginia, just a short drive to Washington; Tom Clancy country.

You can almost feel what’s going on. Cloud-based services are crashing and there’s a scramble for answers. Elsewhere, PC screens are refreshed as readers wait for an update from Sysadmin, (Kindle edition not yet available). Some 18 minutes pass. Tension builds.

Sysadmin offers an update, referring to isolated “power issues.”

more of the CIO artricle from Patrick Thibodeau

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.