The media has been inundated with reports related to the first cloud outage. Jason Bloomberg draw a number of lessons:

• There is no such thing as 100% reliability. In fact, there’s nothing 100% about any of IT—no code is 100% bug free, no system is 100% crash-proof, and no security is 100% impenetrable. Just because Amazon came up snake eyes on this throw of the dice doesn’t mean that public Clouds are any less reliable than they were before the crisis. Whether investing in the stock market or building a high availability IT infrastructure, the best way to lower risk is to diversify. You got eggs? The more baskets the better.

Read the entire article at http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/04/Amazon-EC2-Outage-Explained.