http://support.rightscale.com/12-Guides/EC2_Best_Practices/EC2_Site_Architecture_Diagrams#Multiple_Availability_Zone_Setup Web architecture site design diagrams from RightScale. It tells you basic ideas how to design redundant web application infrastructure in amazon cloud
http://blog.lastpass.com/2011/05/lastpass-security-notification.html Online password keeping service LastPass.com reports that it is possible that they were 0wned. (how nice!) In the same time, PastPass seems to be doing the right things: they had a monitoring in place, so they have detected an anomaly in traffic. As soon as the anomaly was detected, they have notified their users and proceeded with further measures.
http://openfoo.org/blog/amazon_ec2_underlying_architecture.html Some description of EC2 Internals. EC2s are XEN VMs, mine is currently using Xen 3.0.3-rc5-8.1.14.f , which appears to be F14 Xen package re-build on RHEl5.x (this is by looking at compiler version) . Some info in the article appears to a bit outdated
http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/ Postmortem for the April-2011 EC2/EBS outage. It looks like a human errors plus unfortunate cascade of events lead to a requests storm that brought down EBS storage. Also, it appears that Amazon mis-estimated spare storage capacity needed for recovery from such events.
http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco/netflix-in-the-cloud-2011 Slides from Adrian Cockcorft, Netflix director of cloud systems about current state [for 2011] of Netflix’s AWS-based architecture
http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/5-lessons-weve-learned-using-aws.html Notes from netflix tech blog about some key points of their EC2-based infrastructure design. Note that netflix is not affected by the current EBS problems in AWS US-EAST region. Their key point seems to be to equally split your infrastructure between 3 AZs (availability zones) and run at ~30% capacity, so if 2 AZs fail (as we have now) you would still running in one AZ @ 90%
http://ec2disabled.com/ The subj. looks really bad!
http://justinsb.posterous.com/aws-down-why-the-sky-is-falling A blog post explaining nature of the current Amazon AWS outage. The deal is that several so-called availability zones (AZ) failed simultaneously in amazon US-EAST region, even though amazon’s FAQ describe such event to be unlikely. Many interesting comments – read them!
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Apr-19.html “This announcement means that Dropbox never had any mechanism to prevent employees from accessing your files, and it means that Dropbox never had the crypto smarts to ensure the privacy of your files and never had the smarts to only decrypt the files for you. It turns out, they keep their keys on their servers, and anyone with clearance at Dropbox or anyone that manages to hack into their servers would be able to get access to your files. " – ehh, a way to go dropbox :-( / noted at https://lwn.net/Articles/438401/ ...
http://aws.amazon.com/security/pci-dss-level-1-compliance-faqs/ Amazon AWS is “PCI DSS 2.0 Level 1 -compliant Shared Hosting Provider”. i.e. you can build your PCI-DSS compliant infrastructure using EC2, S3, EBS and VPC to store and process payment card data