Of course, just as I extol the virtues of cloud computing and talk about how much I've moved into the cloud Amazon suffers an outage. Opps.

Well, yes and no to the opps. A lot of people have been saying that as it was one of five Amazon datacenters that suffered this outage systems and services should have automatically recovered at another site.
Well, that's not true. you have to remember that Amazon operates it's data centers just like virtual copies of a real datacenter.
What I mean by that is that if you have a service you host in your own data center then lose that data center you'll lose the service. It's up to you as the admin/developer/owner of the service to make sure that you have redundancy set up in another location be that another Amazon datacenter or a datacenter under your own control.

As I said in my previous blog posting, cloud computing is not a panacea and you have to be careful how you use it. This outage is a classic case in point of that comment.