Posted by Matt Geiser on April 26, 2011
So …….last Thursday through Sunday was a little challenging, as most companies running off the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service grinded to a halt for most of the day on Thursday. Many companies were without access to their business applications, and OnePlace was no exception. Both our customers and employees had to work differently that day. We were fortunate that only one full business day was effected. By Sunday all businesses were back up and running.
By now companies running social business solutions such as OnePlace have realized that E-mail isn’t an effective way to collaborate, managing file versions on a server doesn’t work very well, and having a pulse on your business is difficult when team members aren’t connected. Last Thursday we went backwards – suddenly, E-mail and file servers were used among the team and paper checklists were in vogue again. Our once collaborative environment suddenly became narrow and solitary. Though we were physically close in proximity, except for a developer working remotely from rural Wisconsin, we weren’t quite sure how to communicate or share what we were working on. But what we did confirm, as we already believed, is that OnePlace matters.
As a result of the EC2 outage, we’ll see improvements to Web-based applications to result in greater resiliency to any future outages. See The AWS Outage: The Cloud’s Shining Moment written by one of our local technologists George Reese. If a situation like this occurs again, we can expect reduced application failures, as application architecture will be improved to leverage the cloud rather than succumb to it.
I want to thank our customers for understanding the nature of the failure on Thursday; it’s hard to place a value on the disruption to businesses that day. While our team was able to function, there was a distinct impact on our business and our customers were no exception.
Compensating our customers for their lost productivity is difficult, but as a small consolation we are giving each paying customer OnePlace free for a week.
