New Delhi, Oct. 27 -- Last Monday, the internet's digital bloodstream developed a clot that sent jitters around the world. Amazon Web Services (AWS) began reporting increased error rates and latency in its flagship cloud region, US-East-1, in Northern Virginia. The cause was eventually traced to a Domain Name System (DNS) resolution failure affecting a critical application programming interface (API) endpoint for DynamoDB, AWS's popular server-less database service.

This DNS issue meant that software trying to connect to DynamoDB couldn't find it; not because the database was offline, but the system responsible for translating human-readable names into machine-usable Internet Protocol (IP) addresses had stopped functioning properly. Appl...