A new outage hits Amazon EC2 Xen-based service

TechCrunch is reporting about a new major outage suffered by Amazon on its on-demand virtual infrastructure EC2, based on Xen.

This is the second time that Amazon cannot grant business continuity on such mission critical service.

While this outage lasted only two hours, the previous one, in October 2007, lasted a couple of days and led to the lost of several virtual machines.

One year earlier, in October 2006, EC2 suffered instead a security issue.

On-demand datacenters that virtualization makes cheap and easy to maintain seem still far away from production use.