Amazon's S3 service was down for about 6 hours on Sunday, which drastically affected Fan Profiles. All of the image-based services provided by that product were basically not working, which needless to say was disappointing...

Amazon's Simple Storage Service (or S3) is a service that lets you create, delete, or access data objects (like images) securely using REST or SOAP protocols. It works hand-in-hand with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2) to create a simple and rapidly scalable hosting solution. The benefits of not having to worry about maintaining stores of physical servers and not wasting rack space and engineer's time planning for those one or two days where traffic is wildly higher than average far outweighs the drawbacks of having to deal with this newish technology that is clearly still working out all of the kinks. As SmugMug pointed out in their post on the issue, these outages are few and far between and are generally resolved (reasonably) quickly.

Clearly it's disappointing that Amazon's already experienced two fairly extended outages this year (couple hours each). It's a little unnerving that the complexity of the infrastructure is such that the entire service can go down - Sunday it was all all of the EU and the US! But given that these outages are the exception and not the norm and that cloud computing seems to be the wave of the future and S3 works so nicely with Amazon's EC2 service, it's still a viable solution.