AZs - according to Amazon, "are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones."
that did not really seem to work.
if you're deployed in one zone and shit hit's the fan: "your fault". if you assume amazon does as advertised and live in several AZ and these go down apparently more or less at the same time: 'amazons fault'...
i read that amazon plans to post a 'postmortem' on this... i'd be really eager to know how AZs are actually designed/sperated. not to be able to point fingers (maybe just a little bit), but to just _know_ where i am deploying stuff to...
The genesis of the article was the press implying that to use the cloud your only choice was to trust AWS provided 100% up-time, and this is a position we disagree with.