Lady Gaga and high tech are inextricably intertwined and the latest event to tie her to EDA is the effect that offering her latest album, Born this Way, has had on Amazon’s Web servers. In a bid to highlight its new Web-based Cloud Player music service, Amazon offered Lady Gaga’s new album for 99 cents, priced several dollars below retail. Predictably, this loss leader put Amazon’s Web servers down for the count. (See story on CNN here.) Purchased downloads took hours as the overloaded servers attempted to … serve.
So what’s this got to do with EDA? Consider what happens to cloud-based EDA tools running on the Web servers co-located with the ones trying to serve up Lady Gaga’s latest tunes. Think they’ll be affected by the nearby traffic? I do. I think there will be some observable affect ranging from delays to outright loss of service.
That’s just something to consider, when you also consider that this is the second time in recent memory that Amazon’s cloud services have made major headlines, and not in a good way. (See “What does Amazon’s multiday cloud outage mean for EDA cloud services?“) Note: this is not a slam on Amazon. The company probably offers some of the most advanced Web services on the planet for general use. It’s just that the Web can be unpredictable, powerfully so when provoked. Offering Lady Gaga’s latest at bargain prices is such a provocation.
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