[excuse the poor grammar in the title, it’s a song title.]

I was directly effected by the recent EC2 outage as a Heroku customer. I’ve heard a lot of chatter about how this proves that the cloud isn’t “all that”.  I disagree.  Simply put downtime happens.  One of the things that I pay for as a hosted (cloud) customer is that when downtime happens, I’m not stressed out trying to find the problem.  Some very smart engineers are already working on the problem. 

Yes, you should have redundant systems in place.  It’s like backups, or making sure you don’t enter the crosswalk when the red hand is flashing.  We all know that we should do it but we get burned so infrequently that it doesn’t often occur to us as important until we get singed.  I’ll be looking for another cloud to host a backup in but I’m not going to be running scared to a colo or putting a server in my basement.

Furthermore, I’m going to keep offloading the things that I’m not good at (because I don’t choose to make it my focus) to providers that are good at them, in the cloud.  Simple Worker is my next target.  I looked at setting up a delayed job queue and immediately knew the direction I would be going when I saw that Simple Worker had made it their focus.  I’m going to trust the person with focus to do it better than the dabbler even if the dabbler is me.