It is the Platform Stupid!

Link: Amazon S3 Exceeds 99.99% Uptime. What Amazon is doing with S3 is remarkable indeed. We are going back to the future. When I first went to work for Shell's Information Center in Houston, it bragged that it had the most compute power in one building outside of NASA. Amazon's computing power, for obvious reasons, does not live in one building, but the level of reliability it is achieving is "NASA like" and perhaps better, and its computing power probably exceeds it. There was plenty not to like about mainframe computing, but in the three plus years I spent at Shell, I hardly remmeber anytime at all when they were not "up and running, EVER!

The time is quickly approaching where, as consumers, we are less and less willing to accept services that do not provide this kind of availability, scalability and reliability. You are either going to deliver on the promise or quickly find yourself without customers--simple as that!