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AWS S3 Having Problems Again? (Monday 12PM Pacific)

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Re: AWS S3 Having Problems Again? (Monday 12PM Pacific)

#21

Post by ceejayoz »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #18

I'm risking being inflammatory here, but do people really believe that they get better uptime from AWS compared to renting dedicated servers? I feel like AWS has way too many moving parts to be stable. It's very tempting for them to reuse bits of infrastructure everywhere which increases the chances that if something goes wrong somewhere it will break your stuff. So for example, hosting instance images on S3 means th…

> I'm risking being inflammatory here, but do people really believe that they get better uptime from AWS compared to renting dedicated servers?

I haven't rented servers in about two years, but yes. My old MediaTemple dedicated servers and the pair we had colocated at a local telco's large datacenter experienced occasional network outages and whatnot just like AWS does.

IMO, AWS made load balancing and fault-tolerant setups much more accessible to small businesses. At the time of our switch, getting a load balancer at our colo was quite pricey whereas AWS charges $15ish a month for it. Getting a three-tier setup on AWS was easy, whereas at the colo we'd have to pay for at least 6U of space even for relatively small amounts of traffic.

Re: AWS S3 Having Problems Again? (Monday 12PM Pacific)

#22

Post by cbsmith »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #18

I'm risking being inflammatory here, but do people really believe that they get better uptime from AWS compared to renting dedicated servers? I feel like AWS has way too many moving parts to be stable. It's very tempting for them to reuse bits of infrastructure everywhere which increases the chances that if something goes wrong somewhere it will break your stuff. So for example, hosting instance images on S3 means th…

> I feel like AWS has way too many moving parts to be stable.

Well, everyone has different definitions of stable.

> I'm risking being inflammatory here, but do people really believe that they get better uptime from AWS compared to renting dedicated servers?

I don't think it is inflammatory, but perhaps you have an idealized notion of how well teams manage uptime, and more importantly, failures, on average. Sure, a great team will do fantastic, but an average team will... not.

That said, it seems likely that AWS is hitting some kind of a rough patch right now. There are, however, other cloud services whose uptime records for the last year would be the envy of your typical company's internal hosting services, and I'd expect AWS to return to that fold shortly.

Re: AWS S3 Having Problems Again? (Monday 12PM Pacific)

#23

Post by spydum »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #18

I'm risking being inflammatory here, but do people really believe that they get better uptime from AWS compared to renting dedicated servers? I feel like AWS has way too many moving parts to be stable. It's very tempting for them to reuse bits of infrastructure everywhere which increases the chances that if something goes wrong somewhere it will break your stuff. So for example, hosting instance images on S3 means th…

it's not all about uptime. It's about upfront capital costs.

It also highly depends on the service and solution you build. I know in traditional EC2 space, over the long term you absolute can self-host for far less money, but you are talking about 5-year TCO.

Things like S3 bring another advantage: a globally distributed data store is HARD to build and supply on your own dime. I would argue things like that are much harder to beat self-hosted.

Re: AWS S3 Having Problems Again? (Monday 12PM Pacific)

#25

Post by thspimpolds »

"12:28 PM PDT Between 12:03 PM to 12:19 PM PDT we experienced elevated errors for requests made to Amazon S3 in the US-STANDARD Region. The issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally"

Our AWS TAM called us. I don't think he wanted the nasty call I gave him at 4:30am

Re: AWS S3 Having Problems Again? (Monday 12PM Pacific)

#26

Post by RyanGWU82 »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #18

I'm risking being inflammatory here, but do people really believe that they get better uptime from AWS compared to renting dedicated servers? I feel like AWS has way too many moving parts to be stable. It's very tempting for them to reuse bits of infrastructure everywhere which increases the chances that if something goes wrong somewhere it will break your stuff. So for example, hosting instance images on S3 means th…

S3's uptime is probably an order of magnitude better than I can provide myself. From 2010-2011 I worked with a medium-size MogileFS cluster, with about 160 million files and 50 TB of data, triple-replicated. We had great uptime until we ran out of I/O capacity on the metadata DB. Then we had a week of 10% downtime, while we ordered new database servers from Dell.

As far as I remember, S3's US Standard region hasn't had a serious incident since Fall 2012. That's a pretty great uptime record in general, even though it's terribly frustrating on days like today.

My current company spends a few hundred dollars a month on S3. I certainly couldn't match S3's uptime at that budget. Maybe I could do it at 2-3X the budget, but with that budget it might be easier to mirror my files across multiple S3 regions.

Re: AWS S3 Having Problems Again? (Monday 12PM Pacific)

#27

Post by simonebrunozzi »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #18

I'm risking being inflammatory here, but do people really believe that they get better uptime from AWS compared to renting dedicated servers? I feel like AWS has way too many moving parts to be stable. It's very tempting for them to reuse bits of infrastructure everywhere which increases the chances that if something goes wrong somewhere it will break your stuff. So for example, hosting instance images on S3 means th…

Former AWS employee here. I disagree. Amazon S3 is way more "complex" than you think. This is a talk I gave years ago, I guess most of the principles are still valid today: https://vimeo.com/7330740 In most cases, large cloud infrastructures have a higher uptime than a dedicated one. I said "most", because if your IT is particularly good and well funded, then their uptime might be better.

Re: AWS S3 Having Problems Again? (Monday 12PM Pacific)

#28

Post by akamaka »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #18

I'm risking being inflammatory here, but do people really believe that they get better uptime from AWS compared to renting dedicated servers? I feel like AWS has way too many moving parts to be stable. It's very tempting for them to reuse bits of infrastructure everywhere which increases the chances that if something goes wrong somewhere it will break your stuff. So for example, hosting instance images on S3 means th…

Yes, your comment is unneccessarily inflammatory, in case you're wondering why I'm downvoting you.

Nobody in this thread has made any comments about their uptime expectations before you brought up the subject. There's no sign here of the "people" you are referring to.

Re: AWS S3 Having Problems Again? (Monday 12PM Pacific)

#29

Post by deanCommie »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #18

I'm risking being inflammatory here, but do people really believe that they get better uptime from AWS compared to renting dedicated servers? I feel like AWS has way too many moving parts to be stable. It's very tempting for them to reuse bits of infrastructure everywhere which increases the chances that if something goes wrong somewhere it will break your stuff. So for example, hosting instance images on S3 means th…

AWS is so massive that even when 0.1% of the customers are having problems, it is huge news like this.

The reality is most customers are not affected, and overall service uptime is highest anywhere around.

Not to mention that whenever AWS is having issues it's always in one region at a time, and frequently a single availability zone. As long as you build your application to be AZ-tolerant, you won't run into problems.

Re: AWS S3 Having Problems Again? (Monday 12PM Pacific)

#30

Post by eric_h »

atopuzov wrote: post #14

Amazon yet again lying to it's customers about the status of the service is the only real issue I see here>. Services fail, it's a fact of life but at least admit it's broken and that the issue is being fixed instead of blatantly lying and saying minor disruptions.

http://status.aws.amazon.com appears to indicate that they did have problems and have now resolved them.
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