What has the S3 outage taught us? Even though the public cloud seems almost magical to some people it is, as a famous T-shirt points out, just someone else's computer. That's right, applications ultimately require hardware to run. No matter how many layers of abstraction, orchestration, and automation we have it still runs on a hardware infrastructure. Let that sink in for a minute... Public Cloud makes procurement and provisioning faster, but what about support? Now your application has more layers of abstraction and complexity, and it is being supported remotely in a multi-tenant environment by a person that you don't know.
There are many use cases where Public Cloud is a great fit. SaaS offerings like Microsoft Office 365 are perfect examples. The learning opportunity of the S3 outage is that just as there were issues in private data centers that caused outages, there will be outages in the public cloud as well. This will not be the last time. As long as humans are in the equation the potential for outages exists.
You've probably heard "The answer is public cloud, what is the question?" right? Perhaps more questions should be asked before we determine where we run our workloads?
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