Storefront Backtalk--In a detailed postmortem of its days-long cloud-storage outage, Amazon on April 29 delivered a blow-by-blow explanation of what went wrong: One networking mistake generated a cloud full of "stuck" storage, which in turn filled up all available space with junk data in an attempt to automatically recover and finally required Amazon to bring in lots of new storage hardware to unjam the system.

The cascading problems were the result of Amazon's efforts to promise continuous availability of its cloud storage. That meant no downtime for maintenance windows-Amazon's network techs had to work without a net, and this time they were unlucky. But a dive into the details of the outage suggests that a cloud like Amazon's may not be worth the risk, or even offer an advantage, for big retailers-even though Amazon itself is one of the biggest. Read more!