Amazon.com is promising unspecified changes to its data center power architecture to reduce the number of disruptions for its cloud computing customers. In a lengthy explanation of a Saturday power outage that caused problems for some users of its EC2 cloud service, Amazon on its web services dashboard writes:

"We realize that unavailability of instances can impact customers' applications, and we design our datacenters to provide highly reliable power. However, as a result of the recent power events, we are working on non-intrusive changes to our power distribution architecture to significantly reduce the number of instances that can be affected by failures like we have seen in the last week. This work is under way and will be carefully performed over the coming months throughout our datacenters."

Amazon did not specify what the "non-intrusive changes" will entail.

According to updates on Amazon's dashboard, a power outage to a "set of racks" in the U.S. East coast region caused disruptions for some seven hours Saturday. There was also a separate and unrelated disruption for "a very small number" of Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage) users. The company also reported "power related issues" for some EC2 users on May 4.

Data Center Knowledge has a detailed breakdown of the recent incidents. Amazon reminds customers that they can spread applications across multiple Amazon Web Services "availability zones" and use Amazon CloudWatch and AutoScaling to recover from "instance failures."

Amazon's work on data center power systems comes as it tries to interest more large companies and government agencies in its cloud services. Such institutions often have stringent requirements for security and reliability of data.

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