The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. This week we’ve been talking about the promise of the cloud for EDA, and indeed, there is much promise.

And yet, today we get a reminder of the flip-side: some of Amazon’s services went down for a while. Customers may not experience these as Amazon outages, but rather as Foursquare or Reddit – or EDA – outages. No comment from Amazon as to what happened, but it’s a reminder that such occurrences must be accounted for.

Just as you have to account for the fact that your own server farm might have a power outage or some other failure…