RightScale: Amazon Users Had Least Downtime from Reboots

The Xen security bug-related reboots of major infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers are over, but some of the folks over at RightScale were clearly curious to see how end users fared and if the reboots had colored their perceptions of their cloud providers.

The company released the results of a survey of 449 end users. And according to the results, users of Amazon Web Services (AWS) seem to have fared the best through the reboot period, which lasted days. Amazon users suffered through less downtime, with 51 percent of AWS users reporting no downtime and only 5 percent had to deal with more than 60 minutes of downtime.

Compare that to Rackspace (RAX) and SoftLayer end users. Only 27 percent and 26 percent, respectively, experienced no downtime, whereas 13 percent and 18 percent, respectively, suffered more than an hour of downtime.

The survey respondents only included users of AWS, Rackspace and SoftLayer, as well as organizations that use Xen in in their internal data centers. Of the 449 respondents, 349 indicated they were AWS users, 66 used Rackspace and 42 were SoftLayer users.

“The lower downtime for the AWS reboot could be partially explained by the fact that, unlike the Rackspace and SoftLayer reboots, it did not affect all instances,” wrote Kim Weins, vice president of Marketing at RightScale, in a prepared statement. “AWS reported that it affected less than 10 percent of its entire fleet. The percentage of instances slated to reboot varied for each individual AWS user depending on the instance types used and luck of the draw. Thirty-nine percent of survey respondents using AWS saw less than 10 percent of their instances slated to reboot while 51 percent saw more.”

Because the AWS reboot didn’t affect all instances, it also made it easier for customers to use additional strategies for dealing with downtime. In many cases, they were able to relaunch instances ahead of the reboot or move resources to unaffected instance types—or into different zones.

“For Rackspace and SoftLayer users, unless they had already architected across regions or leveraged automation, they were limited to moving resources between regions, a strategy employed by 15 percent of Rackspace users and 18 percent of SoftLayer users,” Weins wrote. “As a result, 48 percent of Rackspace users and 39 percent of SoftLayer users took no preventative action, as compared to 20 percent of AWS users.”

In the aftermath, most cloud users are just fine continuing on as before, but it has created some negative perceptions; and that shows in the percentage of users that indicated they are less likely to use their current service provider in the future. According to the survey, 10 percent of AWS users are less likely to continue using Amazon, whereas 20 percent of Rackspace indicated a similar situation with their provider and 29 percent of SoftLayer users indicated they would be less likely to use the IBM cloud service in the future. Of the on-premise Xen users, 16 percent indicated the same.