AWS? You mean “AW Sh*t?”

There is a balance in all things.

If you increase security, you reduce accessibility.

If you increase turkey on your plate, you reduce potatoes.

If you move to the cloud, you reduce local resources and increase reliance on their technology.

Before moving too far ahead, it is important to note that outages occur in all forms of everything. If you are on a construction crew and it rains, it means you may not be able to pour concrete that day. Much like if you’re in food service and the power goes out, you may not be able to cook. The same goes for technology and data centers.

Cloud services are applications living on other people’s computers. Those computers live in a datacenter. Those datacenters are connected via networking equipment. That networking equipment is connected to the Internet. For the sake of redundancy, there are multiple datacenters with multiple copies of the same equipment.

On 12/7/2021 – something went wrong at AWS. That something affected everything from Netflix and Disney+ to SaaS Security providers to small start-up applications.

Per AWS: The root cause of this issue is an impairment of several network devices in the US-EAST-1 Region.

While multiple redundancies are built in to cloud services, they are not infallible. They can (and do) fail.

So before the news about their outage becomes stale, let’s make some memes and giggle about it. You know, somebody, somewhere, couldn’t watch Frozen – and somebody close to them paid the price for it!