[chrisjsmith]

Epic fail for the company which is hosting on their kit. Whoever threw it on there is a total dick. There is nothing wrong with EC2 here. It's just not the right tool for the job.

If they are monitoring cardiac patients, they should, at least for non-critical people, have the instrumentation cache the data and send when available over leased lines.

If it is critical, it should be PROPER HARDWARE attached to the POTS network (like we have in the UK!) with multiple redundant networks over several distinct carriers and multiple monitoring stations.

It sounds like their product is a) crap and b) dangerous if used for critical care.

[MichaelApproved]

Ec2 is fine here. All systems have downtime. Its not having a backup system in place that's the problem.

[chrisjsmith]

Cardiac monitoring systems DO NOT have downtime believe it or not.

[ceejayoz]

Bullshit. Leads come off, equipment malfunctions, patients fidget, and they definitely don't have redundant stuff on each patient.

[muyuu]

I'm going to guess grandparent means that they don't include "downtime" in the contract. Which would be outrageous, BTW.

[jrockway]

He's saying that any computer system hosting the data would have downtime. Your own custom data center can blow up just as easily as Amazon's.

Now, if zero downtime is the requirement, then you just need to have a lot of data centers and well-tested failover procedures. It's all very simple, and EC2 can easily be one of those redundant data centers.

[Bo102010]

Do not believe.

[kapitalx]

I wonder if they have the device connected through wifi to the patient's internet connection. I'm sure EC2 is not their only possible point of failure.

[prodigal_erik]

Yeah, I don't know how much I care that Amazon isn't delivering three nines when the local cable monopoly at dad's place is lucky to reach three eights.