A major cloud outage Monday disrupted services across the globe, offering a reminder of how dependent we are on just a few tech giants.
鈥淎mazon Web Services is one of the foundations of the modern internet,” said Shaddi Hasan, assistant professor of computer science at Virginia Tech. “When Amazon breaks, that takes down so many of the services that we use every day.”
Hasan said running a cloud infrastructure is expensive and complex, which is why only a few companies lead the pack.
鈥淭here鈥檚 only a handful of these companies that run infrastructure at that scale 鈥� Amazon, Microsoft, Google and a few others,鈥� he said.
The outage, which began early Monday in Amazon鈥檚 Northern Virginia centers, caused widespread disruptions. Services affected ranged from social media platforms to banking apps.
Hasan said 鈥渢he cloud鈥� is essentially a network of massive data centers or warehouses filled with computers that run the services the public relies on every day. Many of these are located in Northern Virginia, one of the world鈥檚 largest data center hubs.
When it comes to cloud computing, there are only a few big players, Hasan said. 鈥淯nless you’re in the space, they can kind of be unseen giants to a lot of people. So much of our infrastructure depends on them.鈥�
He said businesses are faced with a tough choice that involves deciding to rely on a major cloud provider and risk being affected by outages, or build and maintain their own infrastructure. The latter is an option that鈥檚 often too costly and complex.
Hasan also pointed out that the internet wasn鈥檛 always this centralized.
He teaches his students about the early days of the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, more popularly known as ARPANET. It was the internet鈥檚 predecessor from the 1960s, and was designed to be resilient and even able to work around a nuclear attack.
鈥淏ut as time has gone on 鈥� centralization of the services that run on top of that infrastructure has kind of undermined some of that original ethos and spirit,鈥� he said.
And while outages like this may lead to improvements, Hasan doesn鈥檛 expect a major shift.
鈥淚t鈥檚 hard to imagine a world where 鈥� they move away from that model,鈥� he said.
He said incidents like this highlight just how delicate the system has become: 鈥淚t reminds us of the fragility of relying on just a few large providers.鈥�
And when things go wrong, fixing them isn鈥檛 easy.
鈥淭hese failures are rare, and when they happen, they’re quite complex to remediate,鈥� Hasan said.
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