Provider inside

 Both infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) services are ideal for third party developers to create service offerings or software as a service (SaaS) solutions ready for customers. For instance NetFlix, LinkedIn, and Salesforce are the services powered by PaaS, and IaaS core services but are delivered as a customer ready SaaS service.  As such a Netflix user does not contemplate how Amazon AWS makes their IaaS service work to ensure that they can watch a movie. Bottom line users watch their movies. This model is really the future of cloud services.

However unlike the telecommunications companies that deliver our phone services end to end, cloud solutions like Netflix have a dependency model users should be aware of. Ultimately users should have the right to know who is touching, and managing their data. And providers should be required to expose the information.

Let's consider this.

The videos serviced by Netflix powered by Amazon AWS requires that Amazon hosting, storage, name resolution, and many others be available, and Netflix provisioning, account management, payment, billing, and many more services be online. The connectivity between the front end services and virtual machines in AWS must run flawlessly, and overall provide a seamless service so that customers can sit back and watch a movie, without complaining about the wait time of their log in, or video playback.  The result of an outage in AWS had broad impact on their customers including Netflix ability to provide their services. Clearly both Amazon and Netflix have worked hard to make their solution redundant and failure resistant, but ultimately Amazon faced the wrath of their direct customers (kindle users) as well as corporate customers like Netflix. Try as they might Netflix was ultimately taken offline by an Amazon service failure.  http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/04/lessons-netflix-learned-from-aws-outage.html.

What is fascinating is that at the end of the day, Netflix can blame Amazon and claim that they have done everything they can to ensure quality of service. And Amazon can dance around the fact that they tried everything to prevent their outage. The truth is Netflix is right. Amazon failed. But what's misleading is that Netflix should also be held at fault. For instance why did they not use multiple cloud providers to reduce the chance of failure, and truly claim elastic computing?

And as a user I should have been able to know how and what Amazon was doing to resolve my issue with Netflix, right?


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