Sean Hull is an independent scalability and performance consultant with iHeavy in New York, and shortly after the AWS outage authored a titled "AirBNB didn't have to fail," referring to the travel site that was one of dozens across the Internet that went down when AWS's cloud hiccupped. In the post, Hull argues there are tools Web developers can use to be tolerant against outages.

A website can be programmed to turn off certain features but keep the main part of the site up and running if parts of a system go down. In this case, someone browsing to the site would still be able to use basic functions of the site, but may not be able to make a purchase on the site. If a website is to be hosted at multiple locations, a browse-only mode could be active so that even if AWS does go out, a bare-bones version of the site is still accessible to users.

Other third-party vendors offer services within AWS's ecosystem for customers to create highly available systems. Amazon Web Services launched a that have been optimized to run on AWS.

Customers can chose a variety of load balancers from one of these partners, such as Riverbed's Stingray division. Apurva Dave, VP of product marketing for the company, says there is a benefit to taking a "best of breed" approach of using third-party apps instead of simply relying on AWS for services such as load balancing.