Opinion
AWS Is Too Big to Fail
As we saw last week, when the backbone of the internet breaks, huge segments of the global economy become paralyzed.
Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s stunningly profitable cloud division, powers the online presences of millions of users—and by users, I mean Fortune Global 2000 heavyweights ranging from Netflix to iRobot to the Nasdaq stock exchange.
Quite simply, AWS is too big and has too many customers for the good of society.
I say this as both an enthusiastic critic of AWS and a happy customer. The most infuriating part is that there’s no clear path out of this state of affairs, only murky, tangled, possibly hazardous ones. The best way to start finding solutions is to draw attention to the problem before we’re all forced to reckon with a much larger disaster down the road.
