We ran this story today in print and online, about Madrona Venture Group leading an investment round of $4.2 million for 2nd Watch, a cloud services company with its HQ in Liberty Lake.

The press release made a major deal out of 2nd Watch having "premiere" partner status with Amazon Web Services, the cloud-service division of Seattle's large online retailer. While AWS is not 2nd Watch's exclusive service provider, it's the No. 1 option for helping other firms get on the cloud, the release noted.

And we made sure, when researching the story, to ask folks at 2nd Watch about the reliability of AWS in light of another major service disruption over the holiday.

Stories noted that AWS lost some of its data center operations in the East, with the result that at least one large consumer experience, streaming of Netflix video, was disrupted.

So we asked co-founder Jeff Aden if AWS has had any problems that affect 2nd Watch customers. Here's his reply:  "I can’t comment on Netflix as I do not know the details of what took place and there has been no postmortem on the topic. 2nd Watch has not had a single High Availability “HA” architecture or HA customer that has had a business impact due to AWS (problems)."

That WSJ.com story cited above noted: "The Amazon unit said it identified and fixed technical problems at its operations in Northern Virginia. They affected other firms besides Netflix, including Scope, a San Francisco social-media company, and software company Heroku Inc.

"Amazon hasn't offered an explanation for the source of the outage, which didn't affect its own online operations. A spokeswoman said Amazon would release a full summary of the outage in the coming days."
 

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