We use EBS, and had machines in the availability zone that went down that were affected. Those machines were out for longer than a day, but we were back up within an hour because we had redundancies built in across other availability zones.
If you're doing anything that matters, you can't rely on a single zone/machine/whatever, no matter who your hosting provider is.
Just a higher level of abstraction. Many people don't want to care about what zone they're running in, or really anything about the machine (or even virtual machine) they're running on; they just want to run their apps "somewhere" that persists through hardware problems. Maintaining such a thing isn't Amazon's charter, though; it's more the job of a cloud application hosting provider, like Heroku (who I'm surprised isn't multi-homing their apps on several clouds by now for just this reason.)
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We use EBS, and had machines in the availability zone that went down that were affected. Those machines were out for longer than a day, but we were back up within an hour because we had redundancies built in across other availability zones.
If you're doing anything that matters, you can't rely on a single zone/machine/whatever, no matter who your hosting provider is.
So you're saying we need a cloud of clouds?
Just a higher level of abstraction. Many people don't want to care about what zone they're running in, or really anything about the machine (or even virtual machine) they're running on; they just want to run their apps "somewhere" that persists through hardware problems. Maintaining such a thing isn't Amazon's charter, though; it's more the job of a cloud application hosting provider, like Heroku (who I'm surprised isn't multi-homing their apps on several clouds by now for just this reason.)
Sounds like a certain exotic financial instrument...