I thought we had heard the end of availability issues last year (see my blog from last year). After all, reliability and having enough processing horsepower to keep applications available across failures is one of the big benefits of migrating to the cloud or developing applications natively in the cloud.
But NO. This year, the Amazon AWS outage outdid everything we have seen before; many services — such as Roku, Vonage, Adobe, Washington Post, Flickr, Autodesk, to name a few — were impacted for 8+ hours. Such service disruption often leads to poor customer experience, and attackers and hackers know this and use a broad set of techniques to cause harm.
