EC2 Storms (opens in new tab)

How is this any different from a large corporation? Having been on both sides, I'd argue that Amazon's mean time to response/resolution is as good as or better than what is generally seen in silo'd enterprise shops (provided you pay for AWS support- strongly recommended for those with mission-critical cloud infrastructure).

That's a good point Mark. Systems that aren't as sensitive to latency won't be affected as much by these types of issues. When you begin to require a certain level of network performance the lowest-common-denominator network configuration that cloud hosting offers may not be sufficient.

The LB that was performing well was getting more traffic. I initially wanted to break out response times by LB because I thought maybe that was the underperforming machine, but my intuition was wrong and the opposite was true.