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D ANGERS ABOUND: SECURITY IN THE C L O UD

Internet in the northern Virginia area. The outage started at
12:34 a.m. Pacific time, according to Apparent, 34 minutes
before the dashboard reported a problem. It ended 44 min-
utes later, at 1:19 a.m. Pacific. The posts to the Service Health
Dashboard indicated an ongoing problem until 1:51 a.m.,
when the post, “The underlying power issue has been ad-

dressed. Instances have begun to recover,” appeared. The ini-
tial notice was late, but to be fair, the notice of recovery trailed
the start of the actual recovery by 32 minutes as well, accord-
ing to Apparent’s information.
The information that Amazon makes available when such
incidents occur seems to be aimed at minimizing the problem
rather than acknowledging its scope. It may be put there by

someone who is busy solving the problem, not by someone
who is on standby with nothing to do but explain mishaps to
the public. In short, Amazon Web Services achieves a high de-
gree of translucency with its Service Health Dashboard, but full
transparency is too much to expect from your cloud provider.
This is very different from data center operations, where the
people who answer questions can be fired by the people who
are asking them. In the data center, obviously, the facilities are
directly under a company’s control.

On the other hand, Amazon Web Services representatives
may debate my statement that postings tend to minimize the
severity of the problem. The second notice, at 1:26 a.m. Pacific
time, stated that the data center managers were experiencing
“power issues for a subset of instances in a single availability
zone.” This sounds like a contained outage, possibly a minor

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