S3 down again with no visibility into cause or time to resolutions

More downtime for Amazon S3 doesn't make the Cloud any more appealing for enterprises.

One of the main reasons enterprises won't be quick to embrace the Cloud for meaningful applications is due to the lack of visibility associated with downtime. Most companies are too paranoid (rightly so) to have no idea what caused system downtime or to have a clear mean-time to resolution.

As an S3 customer we should definitely be able to get notifications and have the ability to ask for refunds. I couldn't figure out how to do either one.

For basic monitoring you can get free updates on a number of Cloud services from Hyperic's Cloudstatus.com and Amazon's Service Health Dashboard .