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What caused the biggest AWS outage in years?

Welcome to Protocol Cloud, your comprehensive roundup of everything you need to know about the week in cloud and enterprise software. This week: a post-mortem on the big AWS outage, a rundown on re:Invent so far and Salesforce is now a Slacker.
Given the way this year has gone, it really shouldn't be surprising that AWS kicked off the biggest three-week stretch of its year — the re:Invent conference — with one of its worst service disruptions in recent memory.
Last Wednesday's outage knocked prominent AWS customers such as Adobe, iRobot and Roku offline for several hours. It was a noticeable blip in what had otherwise been a strong operational year for the cloud leader, especially during a period in which demand for cloud services skyrocketed. Over the holiday weekend, AWS released a lengthy post-mortem detailing what went wrong, and how it plans to prevent similar problems from occurring in the future.
Modern cloud computing is ridiculously complicated, and it's managed by people. And people make mistakes. Still, no cloud provider wants to be seen as unreliable, even if 99.97% uptime is considered problematic. Anyway, here's what you need to know about last week's outage:
AWS plans to make several changes in the wake of this incident.
So what can we learn from this incident, other than the fact that a lot of people don't really understand how cloud computing works in practice?
Cloud computing is built on the back of thousands of outages large and small, which people have learned from over the course of 15 years. If you get a few drinks in them, the people who know the messy details of how modern enterprise systems are architected reveal their amazement that the whole thing actually works as well as it does.
What is confidential computing? There are ways to encrypt your data at rest and while in transit, but confidential computing protects the integrity of your data while it is in use. Data threats never rest, nor should the protection of your sensitive information.
The New Enterprise: Over the course of this week, in our latest Protocol Manual, we're taking a look at the people, companies and trends that are shaping enterprise computing. Earlier this week we shared the story behind Zoom's unprecedented scaling event, updated the state of cloud economics and examined what "lock-in" means in today's IT world. Today: Why data centers will never look the same again. And there's still more to come.
Re:Invent: It's AWS week, at least in the virtual sense, and CEO Andy Jassy's marathon keynote speech Tuesday morning laid out more evidence for the fact that hybrid cloud is here to stay. Although based on Jassy keynotes going back several years, it's hard for many of us to believe that this was the plan all along. More on AWS' announcements below.
People are typing: Salesforce's decision to shell out nearly $28 billion for Slack will go down either as either the masterstroke of a decades-long M&A strategy conducted by Marc Benioff, or the moment at which the company that pioneered the cloud hit a ceiling. Either way, the next few years of enterprise SaaS won't be boring.
Here's a brief summary of some highlights from the first 36 hours of AWS re:Invent 2020:
What is confidential computing? There are ways to encrypt your data at rest and while in transit, but confidential computing protects the integrity of your data while it is in use. Data threats never rest, nor should the protection of your sensitive information.
Thanks for reading; see you next week.
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