Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

2011: The global failure which affected medical services

In April, 2011 EC2 web hosting from Amazon allowed technical failure which stopped work of some most popular social websites, including Reddit, Foursquare, Quora and Hootsuite, failures in service continued within several days.

But, considering a wide covering of a hosting of Amazon, it is no wonder that action of shutdown extended out of limits of Internet startups. Jason Calancanis indicated the disturbing message placed in forums of Amazon, allegedly from the company of warm monitoring of patients with the heading "Life of Our Patients Is Staked — I in Despair, I Ask You to Contact Me". Message of the following contents:

"Sorry, unfortunately, I could not go some other way. We - the monitoring company also control hundreds of cardiological patients at home. We do not accept signals of their ECG since April 21. Could you contact us?... Or let me know, please, as I can contact you directly. Thanks".

There was no reply of Amazon yet intensive discussions under the message concerning that began, the company should or not to put life of the clients into dependence on reliability of servers of Amazon.

According to one commentator:

"Do you put the vital systems on virtual servers? What is the hell with you?"

Other commentator supplements:

"A question which arises first of all why you left yourself and your patients open for this risk? I hope that you for the sake of your patients, will begin to treat IT planning more seriously. It is obvious that you do not provide fault tolerance of a system and you expect the solution of Amazon. Anyway, you can think of permission of those shortcomings that you created in your system, i.e. to begin to work at an alternative basis, providing that it is necessary for you. And if you are not able to find a method to make it already now, I insist that you should not have started rendering such services at all".

The initiator of a subject answered, having written:

"It is a house, but not intrahospital system. So the promised 99.95% of readiness – are fine" and "it is not intended for rescue of life. What does not mean - life of the patient will not be saved at its use".

Others claimed that, despite impossibility to regulate operation of servers, the villain was Amazon because of failures of servers and its inability to react to calls for help:

"Eventually, the market will solve. If his patient dies, he will be dismissed and/or his company will leave business... I am sure that there were hundreds of other crucial applications of health care systems which fell too. Amazon services a hosting of hundreds of thousands of clients in the east American region. It one of the largest".

"The villain here - Amazon, but not specific developers who can or cannot work in the field of health care".