Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS US East is experiencing high error rates on several services

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 184 posts

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

#111

Post by ams6110 »

ukd1 wrote: post #76
nasalgoat wrote: post #69

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.

I was watching Netflix this morning and a number of titles had troubles loading repeatedly. They did eventually work though.

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

#112

Post by jsprogrammer »

onetom wrote: post #110

For ADHD I would recommend Concerta/Ritalin/Adderall; that would enable you to read for not just a few seconds more but even minutes more before you judge. (I'm not joking here, I'm using 36mg Concerta for about about 4yrs now. Before that I also often came across as an asshole.) There is also a less evasive way of improving your online communication quality: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

The feedback is valid. If they can't figure it out in 10 minutes, then they can't figure it out. It doesn't help that the inner workings are obfuscated through multiple license agreements and hidden/closed source.

We are constrained by time. We can't invest our time into investigating every claim that we come across.

Drugs can help some, but they are not necessarily the answer in all cases (including this case).

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

#113

Post by bsdpython »

mdnormy wrote: post #10

I hate the fact that most people(including me apparently) still assume AWS is not in their "downtime" equation. Just spend the last 30min troubleshooting SMTP auth problem. Not funny when its Sunday.

Between AWS, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and like I doubt I am alone in spending a ton of my time working around their various issues to run my tech stack.

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

#115

Post by cguess »

zurn wrote: post #103
acdha wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are many high profile companies down (airbnb, IMDb, tinder, ...) so apparently this is not so straightforward.

Explains the weird 500's i was getting when trying to do a review this morning.

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

#116

Post by gshx »

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…

Running multi-region services has associated costs. It's also non-trivial engineering effort to convert most services to a multi-region setup. It's definitely worth the investment though. Another option is to run multi-region on the same provider (like AWS) without using proprietary services like DynamoDb but maybe something similar like Cassandra.

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

#118

Post by nadams »

onetom wrote: post #110

For ADHD I would recommend Concerta/Ritalin/Adderall; that would enable you to read for not just a few seconds more but even minutes more before you judge. (I'm not joking here, I'm using 36mg Concerta for about about 4yrs now. Before that I also often came across as an asshole.) There is also a less evasive way of improving your online communication quality: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

That was from my phone which is why it was sparse...but...

> The Datomic software consists of the peer library and the transactor

> These components connect to one of several storage service options

I'm pretty well versed in computer science and buzzwords - but that means nothing to me. That was from the overview which I expected a dead simple "this is what it does and why you need it". There are several important questions that don't seem to be addressed:

- I'm guessing it's a database proxy that's intelligent?

- Is it better than HAProxy?

- How is it different/better?

And most importantly:

- Do I need to modify my current code base to interact with this thing?

In case you think I'm being overly dramatic - here are 2 examples:

https://www.statuspage.io/

On the front page I know exactly what they offer.

https://slack.com/is

On the product page I can see exactly what slack is and offers.

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

#119

Post by faizalzakaria »

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.

Kinda agree, same goes to AWS tools, Opsworks screwed us up back then due to AWS outage, and decided to decouple as much as possible from Opsworks.

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

#120

Post by cle »

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.

How would this have helped? In the event of an AWS outage, you have all-hands of one of the biggest tech companies in the world working to fix your infrastructure. This outage lasted a few hours, wouldn't it take you that long to switch providers anyway? If you don't abdicate responsibility for maintaining the infrastructure, you lose a lot of the operational benefits of using a cloud service...in general, I think it makes a lot more sense to embrace whatever cloud provider you're using (provided you made a good choice) so that you can focus your efforts on your product and not on maintaining infrastructure.
Post reply on HN