Amazon EC2 at Cloud Expo

Apparent Networks issued a new Performance Advisory detailing an outage of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services.

The outage occurred on Dec. 9, 2009 beginning at approximately 3:34 a.m. EST and lasted approximately 44 minutes.

During that time, access to systems in the Amazon’s northern Virginia data center was unavailable to businesses.

Apparent Networks’ Cloud Performance Center, a free service that offers performance data on leading cloud computing service providers such as Amazon, Google and GoGrid, detected the outage.

The Cloud Computing Performance Center utilizes Apparent Networks’ PathView Cloud service to test the performance of cloud service providers. The service has been configured to sample path performance to a series of pre-determined targets hosted at Amazon’s data centers every 120 seconds.

The Cloud Performance Center provides real-time and historical data to help inform IT teams of network performance issues that could impact effective delivery of cloud services. It provides network path performance metrics—including bandwidth, jitter and latency—for the cloud providers based on path destinations that include major cities throughout North America.