How Red Oak Strategic Addresses AWS Service Outages
When AWS experiences a service disruption like the one on Monday, the ripple effects can impact countless businesses that rely on cloud infrastructure for their daily operations. At Red Oak Strategic, we take a proactive and transparent approach to managing these events, ensuring that our clients remain informed, supported, and protected from downtime as much as possible.
AWS reports annual availability and “uptime” goals for categories of its services, available in the table below. Even more importantly, AWS offers what they call “eleven 9s” (AKA (99.999999999%!!) assurance that any data you upload and store in S3 will never be deleted or lost.
Despite these general performance levels being strong - this week’s AWS outage is a timely reminder of why our response playbook matters. Here’s how we handle situations like this:
1. Assess the AWS Health Dashboard
Our engineering team immediately monitors the AWS Health Dashboard and internal status alerts to verify the scope and duration of the incident. We confirm which AWS regions and services are affected and assess potential impact on any Red Oak Strategic -managed workloads.
2. Independently Confirm/Measure Service Impact
Rather than relying solely on AWS communications, we use internal monitoring tools and performance metrics to validate whether client environments are affected. This allows us to detect and quantify the impact independently and quickly.
3. Alert Clients, Regardless of Severity
Even if the impact appears minimal, clients receive a notification from our team summarizing what’s happening, what’s being monitored, and what to expect next. We believe proactive communication is always better than reactive damage control.
4. Coordinate with AWS Engineering Contacts
Our engineers stay in contact with AWS support and engineering teams to gather verified information and understand timelines for resolution. This direct coordination ensures our clients are getting the most accurate and up-to-date information available.
5. Deploy Hotfixes or Temporary Workarounds
When possible, we implement mitigations or failover strategies to minimize disruption. Whether that means rerouting services, scaling across unaffected regions, or applying configuration-level hotfixes, our goal is to keep client operations running smoothly.
6. Review Monitoring and Automation Systems
Once service is restored, we conduct a full review of monitoring logs and internal alerts to confirm that no issues were missed and that our automation systems performed as expected. This continuous validation process helps us improve our response each time.
7. Outage Debrief and Business Evaluation
Finally, for production workloads, every outage provides an opportunity to review architecture and ensure that the level of backups and resilience is a match for the business cost of downtime. While internal systems may accept outages, Red Oak can design and implement cross-region or even cross-cloud resilience measures that can be pricey but can save hours or uptime a year which may represent millions of dollars in revenue saved each outage.
Commitment to Reliability and Transparency
Cloud infrastructure is powerful, but outages are an inevitable reality. What sets Red Oak Strategic apart is how we respond: with clarity, speed, and accountability. Whether the disruption is a brief slowdown or a major regional outage, our clients can trust that Red Oak Strategic is monitoring the situation closely and communicating every step of the way.