D'oh! Amazon Cloud Fails at Its Cloud Summit

I'd like to use this space to tell you about Amazon's cloud announcement at AWS Summit San Francisco this morning... But the keynote web stream failed spectacularly.

If only @amazon had access to some kind of "cloud" service that might boost performance of its web stream? #AWSSummit

— Mitch Wagner (@MitchWagner) April 9, 2015

This is what the stream looks like now:

Fortunately, I have Twitter to keep me amused:

The #AWSSummit keynote experiences buffering issues during Hulu's talk about using AWS for streaming.. D'oh! pic.twitter.com/N9s2ahAWNW

— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) April 9, 2015

Who is the bigger let down here #AWSSummit or http://t.co/E7XhxH2uTm ?

— Bryan Dombrowski (@BeDombro) April 9, 2015

Today's #AWSSummit live stream is not a good promo for @awscloud services. pic.twitter.com/gnmCQxf3fE

— Miran Hojnik (@mhojnik) April 9, 2015

#AWSSummit - Video stream is choppy and constantly buffering. One would think AWS would know how to do this.

— Bruce Wolfeld (@BruceRW) April 9, 2015

#AWSSummit live stream is just about useless, way to promote us moving everything to the cloud.

— Michael Brown (@mikebrown073) April 9, 2015

A couple of tweets suggested Amazon should go to competitors Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) for help:

.@awscloud desperately needs the experience @google has got from scaling @youtube ... guys really, Y U NO scale video stream? #awssummit

— Radek Simko (@radeksimko) April 9, 2015

I think #AWSSummit needs @MSFTAzureMedia for their stream :) http://t.co/jfLWw0GZ1S @Azure

— bhitney (@bhitney) April 9, 2015




The outage isn't just a black eye for Amazon -- it reflects badly on all cloud providers, including carriers, which are hosting their own cloud services and looking to partner with Amazon and other carriers to lure enterprise business.

We'll have updates for you on the announcements as soon as we get them, and also see what Amazon has to say about the failure.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to do my best to keep my fellow frustrated stream-viewers amused with polite conversation:

What are you doing while the #AWSSummit stream buffers? Me: Picking up dog poops in the backyard.

— Mitch Wagner (@MitchWagner) April 9, 2015

Updated 6:30 p.m. EDT: Amazon said in email: "Our video streaming provider had a cache configuration problem that caused degraded performance during the first 30 minutes. Once the configuration was fixed, video streaming returned to full capacity. A recording of today's keynote will be available tonight at https://live.awsevents.com."

I replied: "Was AWS technology in any way the cause of the problems? Shouldn't customers be concerned about trusting mission-critical workloads to the cloud when even Amazon itself can't provide a problem-free stream for its own event?"

I'll let you know if I get a response.

— Mitch Wagner, , West Coast Bureau Chief, Light Reading. Got a tip about SDN or NFV? Send it to [email protected]