Amazon Outage Shows Limits of Failover 'Zones'

jbrodkin writes "For cloud customers willing to pony up a little extra cash, Amazon has an enticing proposition: Spread your application across multiple availability zones for a near-guarantee that it won't suffer from downtime. 'By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location,' Amazon says in pitching its Elastic Compute Cloud service. But the availability zones are close together and can fail at the same time, as we saw today. The outage and ongoing attempts to restore service call into question the effectiveness of the availability zones, and put a spotlight on Amazon's failure to provide load balancing between the east and west coasts."

Re:sounds like TWCs DNS servers

[trapnest]

Not that you're wrong, but that's not the fault of the DNS servers, Akamai should be using geolocation by IP, not by the location of DNS servers.
Infact, I'm not sure how they could be doing geolocation by the client's DNS servers... are you sure about that?