Amazon Not Completely Back Up After 96 Hours

For many it has reached a point of no return for Amazon AWS’ creditability, at least for their EBS service and dependent services including EC2 and RDS. The online status portal still shows problems for EC2 and RDS in the North Virginia availability region even though they claim that service has returned to normal for most of their customers. I was able to recover my last remaining AMI (Amazon Machine Image, their name for a virtual machine) yesterday afternoon following 72 hours of downtime and an 8 hour snapshot job of a 250GB volume required to move the volume to a different availability zone. With all the AWS systems I have under administrative control back online I guess I fall in to that “most customers” category but given current postings on the AWS forums and constant complaints over the poor communication and value of paid support, there are others still realizing the effect of an inexcusable disaster in design and engineering. Like many I suspect, I’ve established accounts with two other popular “cloud” providers over the weekend and have begun evaluating their services as replacements or at least diversification from a pure AWS cloud infrastructure. Neither of them offer the diversity in their functional feature sets and the powerful API capabilities that drew many to AWS in the beginning but I suspect that those are options many will learn to work around in favor of up-time, at least until Amazon proves they should have the trust of customers again.