The four-year ordeal Orion's president underwent to launch Eclipse -- a sprint to stay in the race with Tamarac and Black Diamond for rebalancing

As a small company, not on the radar screens of rebalancing software providers or users I have some comments. Rebalancing is simple in concept, complex in the details. Hiding that complexity was a big deal as noted in the article. It was the largest part of my product development effort. The approach is to treat rebalancing as an optimization problem. Find trades that return a portfolio (multiple accounts for one household) to or near target asset allocation percentages while minimizing trading costs. These costs (commission, spread, taxes) are directly calculated. This approach eliminates the need to set arbitrary thresholds that are normally used to trigger rebalancing. The basic formulation eliminates complexity. It's a different approach, that is currently available for individual users. However, the core technology is structured to suit small RIA firms. Interested readers can see more at <a href="http://www.statespacetech.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.statespacetech.com</a> -- See the product support and help pages for an in depth view of this different approach to rebalancing.

Not a good day for Amazon Cloud. Would I even have been able to trade today?

We are on Amazon at RIABiz. It damaged us

Citrix ShareFile --also residing on AWS-- was out of commission for most of today as well. Not a good day, but Amazon has a lot of really sharp people on board. My hunch is that they'll learn quick from this and find a way to not repeat mistakes.

The Amazon outage did not affect all AWS services. Depending on which AWS technologies were in use by its' consumers had a big influence over how severely their service was affected. WealthSite makes extensive use of AWS and our services didn't skip a beat. Amazon has done a good job of partitioning their infrastructure to reduce the effects of the failure of one subsystem on the entire platform. With this failure they have to rethink the resiliency of S3 and is supporting infrastructure. It's important people know and understand that proper software architecture that closely examines the underlying IaaS architecture is key to reducing the risk of being taken down in a partial failure. The sites must effected were those making heavy use of S3 in their front end. AWS and its competitors are here to stay and have become vital resources that are powering fintech innovation now and into the future. Pete

Here is a a good 60 second read on the subject: The Amazon S3 outage was actually a good thing, you probably want more like it. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazon-s3-outage-actually-good-thing-you-probably-want-skipper" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazon-s3-outage-actually-good-thing-you-probably-want-skipper</a> Pete pete@wealthsite.com

Pete's link is worth a read! Amazon seems to be so good that it's mistakes are good. Brooke