Did you bet the farm on Amazon's cloud? Time to wean yourself off

It's not all doom and gloom

But there is a bright spot.

Despite the embarrassment of Netflix this time around, there were plenty of other AWS customers last weekend who didn't seem to suffer – among them, News UK. Rupert Murdoch's news operation runs the paywall, *ahem* "access control system" and the tablet and web versions of the Times, Sunday Times, and The Sun on AWS. They didn't go down.

The best way to avoid going dark is to architect your service to fail over to different nodes within a region. Even better, different regions. The AWS outage was centered on the giant's US-East region – it has eight others across the planet.

You can build a caching layer above your chosen cloud platform to carry copies of your data. It's like the time delay on TV and radio to stop naughty words leaking over the airwaves. You work with the cached data until the underlying one comes back when your copy replicates and updates.

Another option is to not rely on a single cloud provider. This is an option more open to users of IaaS and PaaS rather than SaaS.

CIOs The Reg talks to aren't going with a single IaaS or PaaS provider, they are going with more than one in a dual-cloud strategy. They might, say, pick AWS for compute and Google for storage. Or AWS for one business unit and Microsoft Azure for another, where there are competitive concerns. There are, of course, other regional and global public cloud firms available.

This is good for failover, yes, but also to help ensure you don't become hostage to one provider. Keeping multiple suppliers in the mix gives you leverage on price and helps ensure that your public cloud providers don't start to take you for granted.

Cassandra database provider DataStax told me recently that it's seen use of dual cloud grow during the past 12 months.

DataStax this week joined Microsoft's Enterprise Cloud Alliance, meaning its Cassandra implementation is integrated with Azure for automated, wizard-driven deployment – Datastax also announced its Enterprise 4.8. DataStax was already on Azure and is also on AWS.

Billy Bosworth, DataStax chief executive, said: "We are seeing increasing examples where customers want to have multiple cloud vendors. People are looking at not putting all their eggs in one cloud basket, but looking at the pros and cons of each solution."

The endgame is portability for genuine load failover in the event of emergency.

That is, moving your data or your applications between IaaS providers the same as you'd switch traffic between data center providers, in the event a server, data center, or network connection goes down. Some claim to offer this, but it's not clear how. Further, the actual moving of data is what costs real money. Public cloud providers let you check in new data any time you like, and the room charge is small if the data doesn't change. The charges only rack up when you move your bits around their cloud – or want to extract them.

Heads should roll at Netflix for its over-dependence on AWS. Increasingly, its status as an all-in-one-AWS pioneer is hurting it. There are options in the IaaS and PaaS world. It's time to diversify. ®