Amazon user Indaba pokes fun at cloud troubles in Site Down Jam! contest
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The digerati are merciless when it comes to fail whales. When Tumblr, the blogging platform, experienced technical difficulties in February, one user created a parody site, Stumblr, to poke fun at the misfortune.
So it was only a matter of time before someone took the time to make light of Amazon’s ongoing cloud computing trouble -- which is gaining the nicknames Cloudburst and Cloudgate, and spawned the #EC2 hashtag in reference to the Elastic Cloud Compute service at the center of Amazon’s troubles.
A good-natured jab came on Thursday from Indaba, an Amazon EC2 customer as well as a digital music sharing and remix site used by more than half a million artists.
Indaba, whose site was one of the many that relied on Amazon’s servers, launched a Site Down Jam! contest, giving away a base track and challenging its users to create a song about the misfortune.
Entrants get an ‘I Survived the Amazon EC2 Cloud Meltdown of 2011’ badge for their Indaba profile pages. The winner is to be crowned Site-Down Jam All-Star and receive a $100 gift certificate for, where else, Amazon.
Amazon, the leading online retailer, is the leading provider of cloud computing services. The service outages for customers such as Indaba are believed to be widespread, though Amazon so far hasn’t said how many users have been affected.
Last month, Amazon launched its Cloud Drive service, which offers space on Amazon servers where users can store music and other files and play them back from the cloud. The service, ideally, would free consumers from having to store their media files on multiple devices -- laptops, smartphones, tablets.
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-- Alex Pham and Nathan Olivarez-Giles