This VC sees a big opportunity for startups that help protect against cloud outages like Amazon’s by helping customers take advantage of cutting-edge developer tech

• Eric Anderson, partner at Scale Venture Partners, says the AWS outage may mean startup opportunity.
• Serverless computing helps companies automatically scale their applications across multiple regions.
• He says startups like DataStax and Vercel are well-positioned to help customers take advantage.

Amazon’s cloud faced a major outage on Tuesday that took down a huge slew of apps and cloud-connected devices, from Netflix and Tinder to Coinbase and Amazon’s own Ring video doorbells. It may even slow down Amazon’s holiday package delivery plans. 

Notably, Amazon has said that the whole outage was caused by networking issues at Amazon’s Northern Virginia data centers, a region dubbed “US-East-1.” This is Amazon’s oldest and largest cloud region, and with a reputation internally and externally for being prone to outages, as Insider recently reported. 

Eric Anderson, partner at Scale Venture Partners, says that the whole incident showed how important it is that applications are architected to run across multiple of those cloud regions — a lesson of which Amazon itself may still need to be reminded, given that many of its own apps went down, too. Anderson, through Scale, is an investor in firms like cybersecurity company BigID, developer startup Honeycomb, and networking startup Tetrate.

“It’s still true that no one is architecting carefully, including Amazon itself,” Anderson told Insider.

Anderson says that the aftermath of the outage may present an opportunity for serverless computing, a relatively nascent but fast-maturing cloud technology that handles much of the dirty work of multi-region app architectures automatically.

Despite its name, serverless computing involves servers. Its innovation lies in allowing applications to call the appropriate amount of computing capacity into existence for as long as it needs it, and vanish it when the task is done, with no human intervention required. Customers only pay for how much computing time they use to the millisecond. And, importantly, a serverless architecture will automatically source that infrastructure from the best cloud region at any given moment, largely circumventing the problems that hit Amazon’s US-East-1. 

“It feels increasingly useful. We really should make developers think about being multi-region,” Anderson said. 

AWS itself essentially invented the field with its Lambda product, with Microsoft and Google Cloud also now offering their own serverless products. Startups like Vercel and Render are also getting into the field, while the Svelte open source framework grows in popularity.

Anderson also sees a big opportunity for companies like DataStax (in which Anderson is an investor), Fauna, and Yugabyte, which are challenging stalwarts like Oracle and SAP by offering serverless databases that are distributed across data centers around the world. 

Ultimately, Anderson believes that the more that serverless technology helps to automate the tricky business of resiliency, the better.

“It moves people away from having to carefully architect things,” Anderson said.

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