#5 - Amazon EC2 attack prompts customer support changes
The aftermath of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS) against Bitbucket.org, a website hosted on Amazon Web Services, included criticism of the slow response from Amazon's support team and a promise of improved customer service from the cloud giant.
#4 - eHarmony puts Amazon MapReduce to the test
As eHarmony's purpose is to put two people together in a loving relationship, it's no surprise that the company has found a match of its own: the company's matchmaking data and Elastic MapReduce on top of Amazon Web Services.
#3 - Users undeterred by Amazon EC2 lightning snafu
Amazon suffered a major outage in mid-June, as lightning struck one of the company's facilities and damaged several servers. Its users were not overly perturbed, however, and if the generally favorable responses following the company's December outage were any indication, Amazon is learning how to deal with such issues.
#2 - Amazon releases Virtual Private Cloud networking service
The launch of limited beta testing for the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud corresponded with the growing interest in more secure, more reliable and more expensive private and hybrid clouds.
#1 - Amazon EC2 email blocked by antispam group Spamhaus
The number one Amazon-centric story in 2009 was the United States-wide Amazon EC2 IP address blacklist. Real-time blacklist provider Spamhaus shut the door on EC2 email after a spammer used numerous EC2 IP addresses to spread viruses and spam advertising. The incident served to highlight not only another black eye for Amazon's reliability track record but to again raise the question of how the company's security would improve in the coming year.
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This was first published in December 2009