Ken Birman

Professor of Computer Science

Ken Birman, professor of computer science at Cornell University, is an expert on big cloud computing companies.

Birman says:

“Although the AWS outage is certain to catalyze a new round of calls for national regulation of cloud computing, like we do for the electric power grid, I think this event really spotlights shoddy work by application developers who cut corners when building mission-critical applications using the cloud.

“Decades ago, we learned that with proper planning, applications can adopt backup strategies that are extremely effective at mitigating even the most extreme forms of outages. Those same concepts are available in AWS, Azure and Google cloud, but are systematically underused: Companies are literally building cloud applications on which they become totally dependent yet not investing to ensure seamless continuity if their closest primary data center is disrupted.

“Recent product offerings such as Exostellar take replication even further by offering seamless migration from one vendor cloud to another. With Exostellar's product, if AWS becomes disrupted, applications simply jump to Azure.

“So, as I see it, the issue here is not with Amazon AWS, but with its users: Any technology is at risk of disruptive outages from time to time. The issue is when people cut corners but then act betrayed when an outage finally happens. Warren Buffet puts it this way: ‘It is only when the tide goes out that you learn whose been swimming naked.’ And that is what we've learned in this recent episode.”