The AWS Outage and the Growing Cloud Market

One of the quirks about the cloud is that many people don’t really know they’re using it – until something goes wrong.

Take, for example, the four-hour Amazon Web Services outage on February 28. When the company’s S3 service went offline for reasons that have yet to be explained, the domino effect touched numerous websites and apps. Business Insider. Slack. Trello. App stores. Mashable. Even, in the cruelest irony, a website that tells you if other websites are down.

https://t.co/NkUF7hfxVI is down due to the AWS S3 outage in us-east-1 pic.twitter.com/z1YVK2jJV2

— Tyler Fisher (@__tjf__) February 28, 2017

Non-techies who’d never heard of Amazon Web Services may have been surprised to find out that the company they know for retail, video streaming, and Alexa was also, somehow, a crucial support system for so much of the internet.

To be honest, even as someone who tries to stay informed on the cloud and its major players, I found the outage eye-opening in certain ways: it was interesting to see all of the specific and unique ways different companies were affected.

Ultimately, the outage showed that Amazon’s cloud reach is massive. And it’s growing.

In her latest LinkedIn Pulse piece, March VP Juliana Allen offers a glimpse of the growing cloud market. She cites three recent cloud studies from Gartner, IDC and Synergy Research Group, the latter of which reports that AWS now owns 40 percent of the public cloud market.

Even as Amazon’s primary competitors (Microsoft, Google, IBM) try to take a bite out of its market share, their growth most often comes at the expense of other smaller players – not Amazon itself.

Overall, the wider cloud market is expected to keep growing, which likely will mean even more of the apps and services we depend on each day will rely on the cloud.

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In The Evolution of PR, Content Marketing and Blogging, we cover:

• The ongoing changes in the world of PR
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• Important blogging strategies
• How to use press releases for more than just brand-building

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