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AWS US East is experiencing high error rates on several services

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

#82
post #6

The main issue appears to be DynamoDB Here's a copy from the status page. 3:00 AM PDT We are investigating increased error rates for API requests in the US-EAST-1 Region. 3:26 AM PDT We are continuing to see increased error rates for all API calls in DynamoDB in US-East-1. We are actively working on resolving the issue. 4:05 AM PDT We have identified the source of the issue. We are working on the recovery. 4:41 AM PD…

6:19 AM PDT The metadata service is now stable and we are actively working on removing throttles. 7:12 AM PDT We continue to work on removing throttles and restoring API availability but are proceeding cautiously. 7:22 AM PDT We are continuing to remove throttles and enable traffic progressively. 7:40 AM PDT We continue to remove throttles and are starting to see recovery. 7:50 AM PDT We continue to see recovery of r…

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

#83
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly. It's tempting to drink the Kool-Aid on the various services but the more you rely on them, the less flexible you become and more open to overall service failures like this one. You can take advantage of the benefits of EC2 without relying on the other services. I mean, if even Netflix can't stay up during this, what hope does a startup have?

Netflix -IS- up, and working fine. Pretty amazing, imho.

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

#84
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly. It's tempting to drink the Kool-Aid on the various services but the more you rely on them, the less flexible you become and more open to overall service failures like this one. You can take advantage of the benefits of EC2 without relying on the other services. I mean, if even Netflix can't stay up during this, what hope does a startup have?

Netflix -IS- up, and working fine. Pretty amazing, imho.

http://downrightnow.com/netflix

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

#85

Amazon CTO: We designed DynamoDB to operate with at least 99.999% availability :D

I've been using DynamoDB since it was released. In over 3 and 1/2 years of use, this is the first time I've experienced DynamoDB being down.

If down for longer than 18 minutes then they missed "5 9s" availability (.3 hours / 3.5 years). Not that it is supposed to work that way.

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

#86
post #67

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 would highly recommend http://www.datomic.com as a database for multiple reasons, but one of them is that fact that it's totally portable between DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc. You can create a Datomic backup from any of these databases and restore them into a different one with the exact same semantics.

Isn't datomic closed source?

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

#87
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly. It's tempting to drink the Kool-Aid on the various services but the more you rely on them, the less flexible you become and more open to overall service failures like this one. You can take advantage of the benefits of EC2 without relying on the other services. I mean, if even Netflix can't stay up during this, what hope does a startup have?

Netflix -IS- up, and working fine. Pretty amazing, imho.

https://imgur.com/NNYLUZK

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

#88

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.

This really is the first major failure of DynamoDB since when I started to use it, when it was in beta over 4 years ago. Not sure many companies would be able to run a multi-million QPS scale database with such a great availability record. In any case we just moved traffic away from us-east-1 and into us-west-2 and all is fine still so you should design at least your critical systems for regional failures.

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

#89
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly. It's tempting to drink the Kool-Aid on the various services but the more you rely on them, the less flexible you become and more open to overall service failures like this one. You can take advantage of the benefits of EC2 without relying on the other services. I mean, if even Netflix can't stay up during this, what hope does a startup have?

Netflix -IS- up, and working fine. Pretty amazing, imho.

Pocket just came back up also. Issue might be resolved?

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

#90
post #73
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Heroku Status Page: > Our service provider is still working towards resolution of this issue. We will update when we have news, or in 1 hour. I wonder why they don't tell that AWS is their service provider. Is it wrong to make the information less obscure?

Yes, as it's shifting the blame away from their choice - which was to use AWS.

I expect the reason is because Heroku could switch to a new provider in the future and it would be a pain to always update every reference to their provider.

Parent seems to imply there's something wrong with choosing AWS. There is not. (forgive me if I mistook the tone)

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