[jpetazzo]

Well, US East (North Virginia) is actually 4 datacenters. As pointed out in the article, multiple availability zones (=multiple datacenters) are affected by the outage, meaning that even if you deploy on multiple datacenters, you can go down.

Now, if you're talking about deploying to e.g. both US East and US West, I totally agree: it would be a good thing to do. But EC2 does not give you that option - not easily, at least, because there is no convenient way to move volumes or snapshots between regions.

Setting up HA between close datacenters (e.g. 50 miles from each other) is easy, because the latency remains low. Setting up HA between datacenters coast to coast is a whole different story, and the only help brought by EC2 is the fact that you can use the same API to deploy your machines here and there.