matellis

Uh, has anyone on this thread heard of HIPAA? I'm pretty sure having a summer intern get full access to actual patient data shouldn't be possible under a properly implemented set of HIPAA processes, and the same goes for the accidental UPDATE.

The story reminds me of the day I was introduced to "BEGIN TRANS", "COMMIT" and "ROLLBACK" when someone upgraded the Sybase console and helpfully changed the default setting so we didn't need those pesky semi-colons to finish a query any more. The result was:

  DELETE * FROM TABLE x
  131054 rows deleted
  WHERE a = "foo"
  >> Malformed query <<

Phone starts to ring a few seconds later as all the users saw their morning's work disappear.

This stuff is way too easy for us noobs. Thank goodness that with modern technology we've found ways to make sure it doesn't happen any more... :-)

We had a great experience at PIE, highly recommended.

This is fair comment, especially given that they actually emphasized this multi-AZ redundancy.

The genesis of the article was the press implying that to use the cloud your only choice was to trust AWS provided 100% up-time, and this is a position we disagree with.

Cool nick btw.

Our point is it's unfair to blame Amazon 100% when there were viable and affordable ways round this outage. Some of our customers were in US East and had off-site backups, scripted server deployments and were able to get back online pretty quickly.

+1 We agree.

+1 Sometimes it's not cost effective to do all the layers. One of our clients is going to lose $2500 to $3000 today, which is less than they would have spent on avoiding the issue in the first place.

Completely agree.

Yes, absolutely. This is where the product started, tracking EC2 billing. You have to pull down the raw usage data too as the daily Amazon bill updates can be a bit out of sync.