Part 1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2564007

Netflix continued use of AWS would seem to argue against cloud addiction being an automatic path to scale fail.

My understanding is that they use a subset of AWS features - don't they avoid EBS and mostly just use S3?

Yep, they wrote about this on their tech blog: http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/04/lessons-netflix-learned-.... It seems that they identified EBS as potentially problematic and built their system with minimal dependencies on EBS. Consequently they weathered the April AWS outage rather well.