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AWS US East is experiencing high error rates on several services

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: AWS US East is experiencing high error rates on several services

#51

Post by mattkrea »

njharman wrote: post #27
nasalgoat wrote: post #8

This seems like another reason to not rely on Amazon-specific services, other than the obvious vendor lock-in. At least in the event of an instance outage you could conceivably migrate off Amazon to another VPS provider. No one using DynamoDB has an alternative.

Source for service with better uptime than Amazon?

I believe he meant things like using RabbitMQ instead of SQS (SQS isn't very good anyway IMHO) and things like that. More services running on plain old instances rather than AWS specific APIs, Azure specific APIs, etc.

This prevents you from getting too locked in and losing control over your application.

I honestly can't believe that Netflix can't even load their home page without DynamoDB and all this other stuff.

Edit: Looks like Netflix is back online (10:53AM EST)

Re: AWS US East is experiencing high error rates on several services

#52

Post by tcas »

We were in the middle of a large infrastructure change starting at 4:30am this morning, including taking our application offline. I'm very thankful that we did dry runs along with timing how long certain operations like RDS restores should take and planned for abort steps in case something goes wrong.

We noticed that RDS and ElastiCache backup and restores were taking much longer than expected, and once the first set of errors about Dynamo DB came in we decided to abort and try it again at a different date. An hour later we got notifications that RDS was having issues as well. I'm disappointed that it takes so long to update the AWS status page when things aren't working properly.

Re: AWS US East is experiencing high error rates on several services

#58

Post by hox »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #50
nasalgoat wrote: post #8

This seems like another reason to not rely on Amazon-specific services, other than the obvious vendor lock-in. At least in the event of an instance outage you could conceivably migrate off Amazon to another VPS provider. No one using DynamoDB has an alternative.

I don't much use it anymore but this is something I always liked about AppEngine: baked into the pricing is automatic replication over three regions. Serious AWS web apps are also distributed across multiple regions/availability zones, but many companies don't do that. It would be good for hosting services like Heroku, which I use, would replicate across zones also. To be fare to Amazon, they tell you you architect a…

dynamo db is affected in the entire region, however, not just a single AZ.

Re: AWS US East is experiencing high error rates on several services

#59

Post by speleding »

acdha wrote: post #33
nasalgoat wrote: post #8

This seems like another reason to not rely on Amazon-specific services, other than the obvious vendor lock-in. At least in the event of an instance outage you could conceivably migrate off Amazon to another VPS provider. No one using DynamoDB has an alternative.

I don't disagree that you would want to have a rough idea of what migrating off of DynamoDB would require but wouldn't the easier step be using redundancy across regions first? Most of the sites which have suffered downtime due to AWS outages have been operating in only a single region (or even AZ!) and adding the extra level isolation is usually going to be a lot easier than dealing with multiple vendors or having t…

In this case AWS sign in is down (perhaps it depends on Dynamo), so redundancy across regions can only help you if fail over is fully automatic which has it's own problems (split brain syndrome...)
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