By Juliana Vasquez | Staff Writer
Waking up to Canvas being down was a pleasant or unwelcome surprise that many students and faculty at Baylor encountered on Oct. 20. The Amazon Web Services outage disrupted students’ and faculty members’ day-to-day lives, revealing just how reliant the university is on web services such as Canvas.
Princeton freshman Kadie Alvarado said waking up to the Canvas outage was frustrating.
“I didn’t know what was going on, so I was a bit confused and just hoping that it would come back soon,” Alvarado said.
The British Broadcasting Center noted a Domain Name System error caused the outage. DNS acts like a map for the web services that utilize AWS as their cloud computing provider. With DNS down, platforms such as Canvas, Duolingo and Snapchat were essentially driving without their GPS.
Information Systems and Business Analytics Professor Dr. Hope Koch said the outage highlighted users’ dependence on Amazon for cloud computing.
“We didn’t really have the right failover,” Koch said. “We’re highly dependent on Amazon, and didn’t have another system to move all the computing over to.”
Amazon, Microsoft and Google are the three largest technology giants leading the cloud computing industry, with Amazon leading the charge. These three companies distribute 60% of the global cloud, which poses a plethora of issues if one of them were to go down, as seen with the AWS shortage.
Yet companies continue to rely on third parties for cloud computing because it saves them money and requires less maintenance. Most of the general public doesn’t realize that the web services they use on a daily basis are supported by three major technology companies, Koch said.
Covina, Calif., freshman Kat Reyes said she was surprised when she heard that Canvas was down because Amazon’s software supported it.
“It’s kind of crazy that something so big that impacts so many students is owned by Amazon,” Reyes said. “It’s pretty shocking.”
Koch believes the outage was bound to happen as society becomes increasingly reliant on the cloud.
“I’ve gotten to where I love the cloud,” Koch said. “I think we all have. So I think when you get burned, you’ll go the extra effort where you’re not dependent on the cloud, but that burn has to be pretty bad because the cloud is so convenient.”
