On the plus side, the level of transparency that AWS displays and the detail that they provide seems above and beyond the call of duty. I find it refreshing and I hope that other companies follow suit so that customers can understand the details of operational issues, calibrate expectations appropriately, and make informed decisions.
They're less transparent and responsive than most datacenter or network providers -- it's just that most of those providers hide their outage information behind an NDA, so only customer contacts get it, vs. making it public.
Yeah, a good datacenter will have SLAs around the root-cause analysis document for any failures. Like a preliminary report within a day and a final report within 7 days.
I've also had a few cases where providers either outright lied or only gave details if you persisted in requesting them. Having to play that game gets old…
