The Cloud is not a Silver Bullet

Even silver bullets are not silver bullets. You still need a weapon to fire the munition with, the ability and knowledge to properly use it, and the skill to actually land a lethal blow on the werewolf.

Great, insightful discussion of the key problem with people building on top of AWS today - it does not solve all of your problems. You still have to have an operations strategy, a high-availability strategy and a disaster recovery strategy. All AWS does for you is save you the cost of racking and maintaining your own servers.

Not sure what is meant by "S3 has 11 nines of durability". Obviously not an availability number, but what is it?

99.999999999% uptime?

... which translates to 3ms of downtime in 10 years with their current data, which makes no sense.

I'm guessing it's closer to the way that telecom guys work: 1 bit error in 10^12 bits is common for fiber comm.

Their explanation is here: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#protecting

Looks like they're differentiating between durability ("99.999999999%") and availability ("99.99%").

So it's not uptime that has 11 9s…my mistake. Should have checked the documentation.

Also relevant: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4179027/99-99-durability-...