POV: Amazon Outage

That's a big problem.

An outage at Amazon Web Services' S3 storage service disrupted internet traffic across the U.S. on Tuesday (28/02/17). Normally people don’t notice the “cloud” — unless, it turns into a massive thunderstorm.

Amazon Web Services, by far the world’s largest provider of internet-based computing services. This outage caused an unprecedented and widespread performance problems for thousands of websites and apps. Some of the major companies that utilise AWS include Pinterest, Phillips, BMW, Airbnb, Unilever, Netflix, Slack, Spotify, Channel 4, AOL, Ad Roll, DataXU, ITV, Financial Times, GE and loads more.

So, how can you get prepared?

First, you need to understand the outage problem in detail and its aspects from various angles.

• Think business impact - Get a better understanding what was the problem and ramifications.
• Breakdown the problem into parts - Investigate the key elements of the problem.

Second, you need to understand the business linkages between inside and outside the outage problem.

• Gain insight regarding resolution speed - Understand which outage issues were more important for your business.
• Prepare for a business response - Define where and how you and your team should spend its time finding a solution.

Third, you need to cut through outage complexity to reveal the heart of the problem.

• Think consumer impact - Evaluate the consumer and business profitability impact.
• Think business implications - What are business implications - loss revenue, loss traffic etc? Short, Medium and Long-Term.

Fourth, you need to make significant efforts to stay ahead (business ready) and simultaneously step back from the problem - gain business insights.

• What are the learnings' - Take ownership for creating a positive problem solving culture for your business (e.g., viewing problems as opportunities)
• How can you better prepared – Develop a plan to address a potentially future outage. What should the company do? Who should be involved in solving the problem? Who should lead the initiative? Which processes should be adopted?

Be ready

• Develop a Crisis Management Plan- As business you must strive to create a productive problem solving environment. This will require an increased business effort to define the problem clearly, coaching colleagues through the problem solving process and viewing problems as opportunities.
• Adopt an Agile Business Response - These types of events encourage a “test and learn” business culture, managing the problem solving process “flow” and increase efforts to collaborate and involve others in the problem solution.
• Align Internally With Key Stakeholders - Your internal team will need to be ready for these type of events. I would recommend maintaining appropriate link to problem and key stakeholders, in order to focus using time wisely.
• Gain Critical Information, Fast - If you are not directly managing the relationship, you need to engage with entire group leading Amazon efforts to gain critical information and use this forum to push on key questions related to the core outage problem.
• Update Your Senior Management - Your senior management should also be informed, as this could potentially have business impact. I would suggest synthesising your external and internal discussions to increase business awareness and play back key information. Make sure you capture the most critical information to support problem evaluation to validate the action plan.
• Regain Business Trust - You will need to engage with Amazon to regain business trust and understand which steps they adopted to fix future outage problems. Also, to gain insight regarding best practices.

​Final Thoughts
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The breakdown shows the risks of depending heavily on a few big companies for cloud computing. I don't believe that this outage will lead companies to think that the cloud is dangerous. However, companies need to start looking at their application architecture and define a plan to minimise business impact.

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