Episode 84 – AWS and Outages, MWC Announcements

This week's News Roundup covers YouTube's announcement of the appropriately named YouTube TV service, which will offer a bundle of broadcast and cable channels from four major companies for $35; rumors that Apple would replace the Lightning connector on iPhones with USB-C in the fall; and Snap Inc's debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. Our Question of the Week is "What is AWS and why are so many people so dependent on it?" Naturally the prompt here is this week's AWS S3 outage, which caused many sites and services to go down for several hours on Tuesday. We talk through what AWS is, the major products and services that are part of it, how big this is, and the details of Tuesday's outage, in terms of both the causes and the impact, and whether it's healthy that so much of the Internet depends on one company. Our Third Segment is a discussion of some of the phone announcements made at Mobile World Congress this week, from Nokia, BlackBerry, Oppo, LG, and Motorola, and what they tell us about the state of the smartphone market. Our Weekly Pick is a life hack of sorts recommended by Aaron. As usual, you’ll find some links to related content as well as other ways to listen to the podcast on the website at podcast.beyonddevic.es.