Amazon S3 has been down for several hours now and as Jonathan Boutelle (who, by the way is speaking at the Singularity Web Conference) writes, when S3 goes down, the Internet goes down. Along with images on Twitter, SlideShare, SmugMug, and a host of other sites, images on Pistach.io ads are also down. We've also had intermittent issues with Amazon's SimpleDB. I feel that these issues only serve to highlight the age-old danger of having all your eggs in one basket. Especially a proprietary basket. This is why I applaud Google in releasing the Google App Engine SDK as open source.

The launch of services like Amazon's EC2, S3, SimpleDB and Google's Google App Engine herald the birth of the Commodity Web, wherein web infrastructure is infinitely available and metered just like electricity, water, and gas. For the most part, we don't think about the limits or availability of commodities (as the impending ecological nightmare we've woven for ourselves would attest to, if nothing else.) But when we do try those limits, or when the systems of delivery break down (as in blackouts, for example), the extent of our reliance on these utilities becomes painfully clear.

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