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by Bill Sweet
The cloud might be above it all, but the stuff upon which it rests
clearly isn’t. On 6 July, a fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms
left 750 000 people without power in Northern Virginia and took out
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud server facility. This local weather event
left Amazon cloud customers such as
Netflix, Instagram, Perest, and Heroku without access to their databases
for days, and made these services unavailable to Web users around the
globe. Observers have rightly asked what can be done to improve
the grid so that virtual systems aren’t so vulnerable to real-world
events. Researchers are already on the case, with software for improved
monitoring of transmission lines and a big smart-grid pilot project that
will test networking, communication, and distribution-management tools
in an effort to speed up identification of problems and the dispatch of
technicians to trouble spots.
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