151–160 of 184 posts
DynamoDB is literally a garbage. That's why Amazon does not provide any SLA for the service... Even cheap Azure Storage provides cross-region failover.
This might come across as tooting our horn a bit. But it's more about sounding a warning to other startups providing SaaS service built on public cloud. My own misgivings about relying on a cloud provider specific stack (both for the reasons of visibility/debuggability as well as for vendor lock-in) meant that PacketZoom services were not affected by this failure at all because we only use them as one of the many providers of raw machines. We use our own techniques to load-balance/failover among multiple cloud providers too (so even if the raw compute/network went away, our service would take a perf hit but not be completely down).
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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...)
You don't need automatic failover, but you do need your own scripts to talk to the AWS API. The whole point of AWS is automation.
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Garbage you say? Dynamodb blazed a trail for many open source, eventually consistent kv databases. Certainly not garbage.
The only thing DynamoDB can do good is simplicity. Except for this, even MongoDB has tons more features than DynamoDB and the new version resolved performance problems existed in the previous versions.
The aws services stack is deep and deeply intertwined. I've always viewed depending on such stacks in production with skepticism and I'd recommend everybody else does that too. This might come across as tooting our horn a bit. But it's more about sounding a warning to other startups providing SaaS service built on public cloud. My own misgivings about relying on a cloud provider specific stack (both for the reasons o…
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.
The aws services stack is deep and deeply intertwined. I've always viewed depending on such stacks in production with skepticism and I'd recommend everybody else does that too. This might come across as tooting our horn a bit. But it's more about sounding a warning to other startups providing SaaS service built on public cloud. My own misgivings about relying on a cloud provider specific stack (both for the reasons o…
Or you could just run in multiple regions. Using multiple cloud providers limits your ability to take advantage of provider-specific features - why waste time writing your own load balancer when you could use ELB + multiple regions?
Not when the original goal of the very service is to have presence in all geographical regions. If aws us-east is hit, I want the users to transparently failover to a server on east coast (perhaps one hosted by google or softlayer) rather than be directed all the way to us-west or eu.
And as for ELB, one doesn't use ELB for a custom protocol that load-balances/fails-over itself from the client :-)
What is happening to stock price? oh; its sunday; forgot we can't trade.
I don't recall any outages having a material effect on Amazon's stock price.
In the background of such high volatility, it would be hard to pinpoint such a material effect from such a small disruption (in the big picture of course, I'm betting there are some pretty angry customers today due to the loss of a few sigma of reliability from this outage alone).
Now if a study were published indicating customers were switching providers over incidents this, then I think you'd have some material evidence. But is anyone else better yet? Azure was out for 12 hours last year apparently...
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/01/23/cloud...
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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.