An interesting subject is discussed in this article (with some references to more articles and discussions), regarding the question of our dependence on major service providers such as Amazon.  Amazon is a dominant cloud service provider (see here), and lots of what we do and experience every day depends on it.  For example, Netflix, which most of us use frequently (see here), is relying heavily on Amazon AWS.

The article’s focus was on the risks of having one such large cloud service provider that is, essentially, a single point of failure for many of us and for many companies in the US and around the world.

Amazon AWS is engineered to provide the highest data reliability and availability.  But, obviously, these are the “best-laid plans of mice and men.” In other words, things do happen and the service goes down from time to time.  You can read about AWS failures elsewhere on the Web, including this site.

I personally agree with the above sentiment, but don’t think of this as a huge issue:  even the largest past accidents were addressed quickly. Within a few hours.  And the main reason Amazon got into this dominant position in the first place is that the company is very good at providing their services and meeting customer expectations.  If this changes in the future, other players will naturally take over Amazon’s market share…