Hot on the heels of Amazon Web Service’s prolonged outage late last month, Bloomberg has revealed that hackers used AWS as a launch pad for their high profile attack against Sony. In a thousand blogs and a million tweets, the Internets have been set abuzz with attention-seeking speculation about reliability and trust in the cloud. It’s a shame, because while these events are noteworthy, in the greater scheme of things they don’t mean much.
Few technologies are spared a difficult birth. But over time, with continuous refinement, they can become tremendously safe and reliable, something I’m reminded of every time I step on an airplane. It never ceases to amaze me how well the global aviation system operates. Yes, this has it’s failures—and these can be devastating; but overall the system works and we can place our trust in it. This is governance and management and engineering working at the highest levels.
Amazon has been remarkably candid about what happened during their service disruption, and it’s clear they have learned much from the incident. They are changing process, refining technology, and being uncharacteristically transparent about the event. This is the right thing to do, and it should actually give us confidence. The Amazon disruption won’t be the last service failure in the cloud, and I still believe that any enterprise with reliability concerns should deploy Cloud Service Broker (CSB) technologies. But the cloud needs failure to get better—and it is getting better.
In a similar vein, overreacting over the Sony incident is to miss what actually took place. The only cloud attribute the hackers leveraged on Amazon was convenience. This attack could have been launched from anywhere; Amazon simply provided barrier-free access to a compute platform, which is the point of cloud computing. It would be unfortunate if organizations began to blacklist general connections originating from the Amazon AWS IP range, as they already do for email originating in this domain because of an historical association with spam. In truth this is another example of refinement by cloud providers, as effective policy control in Amazon’s data centers have now largely brought spam under control.
Negative impressions come easy in technology, and these are hard to reverse. Let’s hope that these incidents are recognized for what they are, rather than indicators of a fundamental flaw in cloud computing.
K. Scott Morrison's Blog 