Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2), a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the “cloud,” went down Saturday and a bunch of customers lost their application data. We saw this info in Data Center Knowledge and thought it was interesting enough to post here.

Amazon EC2 is basically a virtual data center that allows developers to increase or decrease capacity — from one to even thousands of server instances simultaneously — within moments.

Using Xen Virtualization, each virtual machine is the “equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.”

The incident understandably ticked off EC2 users who lost their data, but it doesn’t look like they have much recourse, since this service is still considered beta and lacks service level agreements.

The outage signals a serious need for backup.

One user, Reuven, posted a comment saying, “To be blunt, this scares the hell out of me. What kind of redundancy does the current EC2 API have to avoid this from happening again? Does EC2 practice what it preaches and use SQS or some other queue service?”
This incident is considered by Amazon as growing pains of EC2 service, which is about a year old now.

Not too long ago I wrote a blog about Sun’s CIO saying the days corporate owned and operated data centers will be a thing of the past by 2015.

But virtualization/ cloud computing issues like this do nothing to win the confidence of conservative data center managers who likely sigh a collective “I told you so” from the safety of their brick and mortar facilities full of physical machines and back up.