Several companies found out today when Amazon.com’s S3 service experienced an outage and left applications without their data tier. I first experienced it this morning about 8:30 EST when those of us on Twitter noticed that avatars were not loading. Later reports of missing images on Facebook, and other applications started rolling in as startups and application developers realized their apps were broken due to the Amazon S3 outage.

So, what to do when you rely on the cloud? Simple – don’t rely on the cloud completely.

SmugMug’s Don MacAskil has it right, and discussed his approach on TechCrunch’s report of the outage:

We do rely on S3 for our primary storage, but we do maintain our own “hot cache” of data in our datacenters, too, which is less than 10% of our total storage. Our customers weren’t affected by this morning’s outage.

PBwiki’s Nathan Schmidt agrees:

Never build your architecture to require low-latency, high-availability access to S3 or its competitors, because you won’t get those – that’s not what it’s for, that’s not what it’s optimized for, and you’re never going to be able to peel back those layers of abstraction and long-haul network.

(Photo credit akakumo)