[divideby0]

that's completely untrue. there are many ways to do fault-tolerance in AWS. it's expensive, but it's possible. netflix even goes as far as simulating the failure of entire aws regions in their simian army testing suite:

http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html

That's why Netflix stays up when us-east or us-west are down.

[kordless]

It is true. Amazon offloads a decent amount of fault tolerance to the application provider, as you point out here. I will also mention that Netflix does not solely rely on Amazon for running their services. They run their own decentralized caching layer: https://openconnect.netflix.com/deliveryOptions/

[beagledude]

Netflix is down.

[veverkap]

Works fine for me