Industry Talk

Regular Industry Development Updates, Opinions and Talking Points relating to Manufacturing, the Supply Chain and Logistics.

AWS outage affects millions: poor data management at fault?

Cloud giant AWS last night suffered a significant outage, with the Kinesis Data Streams API at the root. The failure affected millions of users and dozens of applications and websites, including Adobe Spark, Coinbase, The Washington Post and Spotify. According to Amazon, Kinesis helps collect, process, and analyse real-time data. However, the API’s operational failure suggests that internal data management might not be up to scratch.

Even with cloud giants such as AWS, the challenges that data, integration, data streaming and API management present never truly go away. With an architecture as extensive as AWS’, it is imperative across the board that each and every element of this is integrated correctly, from datacenter through to each digital service.

The issues affecting Kinesis underline the absolute need to be able to process and manage real-time data. If the data stream stops functioning, the fallout can be huge, especially for cloud providers. Managing real-time data comes down to effective integration and monitoring, which allows for a seamless transition into a more modernized data fabric network. By having a responsive integrated platform, data points become more accessible, agile and transparent to understand how application communicate. Organisations need to consider how they are architecting and integrating the streaming platform into the core fabric of their enterprise architecture, united by master data management which has the potential to cross-departmental and geographic borders.

In this instance, AWS should be credited for their transparency throughout the process, keeping customers and the general public informed regarding the latest outage updates and recovery protocols.