"Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data"
developer.amazonwebservices.com
"Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data"
1–10 of 67 posts
Re: "Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data"
#2Although I sometimes get downvoted for this, I'll say it again:
You can't outsource your liability.
If your product is a webapp, then the underlying messy bits of backups, hardware, availability and redundancy also require some amount of conscious thought on your part. Not every site/app needs it's own mini-datacenter, and you might not even need your own dedicated server (though you probably do when you reach a certain minimal amount of scale). But you DO need to have someone who is thinking about backups and availability, and a valid solution is not to assume that the smart folks at Amazon or Rackspace or any other hosting provider are going to be completely and consistently working with your best interests and uptime in mind.
EVRYTHING fails at some point. Every server, every generator, every upstream connection, every hosting provider big or small. And in this case I mean fail as in goes dark for some period of time not covered by backups or hot-spares.
So, plan accordingly.
Re: "Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data"
#3Odd, my car lost my coffee when I put it on the roof on the way to work. Good thing there was backup coffee at the office.
Re: "Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data"
#4...because I didn't have my own backup."
Re: "Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data"
#5There was a pretty lively exchange on twitter last night regarding this. I strongly disagree with the AWS forum poster. EBS does not suck. In fact, EBS and other services from AWS and Rackspace provide the building blocks to allow you to construct incredibly scalable, available systems.
However, you have to accept that when you use IaaS you are taking on some of the operational responsibility and you have to know what you are doing or find someone who does. If this user had been snapshotting regularly to S3, the worst thing they would have experienced is a couple of hours of downtime. All of their data would have been safe and easily recovered.
They didn't do that and the worst case scenario that AWS clearly describes in it's docs (failure of MULTIPLE devices) happened. And it will happen again, someday. Accept that and accept that failure is a feature when systems are designed properly.
Re: "Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data"
#6Why is this on HN? AWS provides a great way to back up EBS volumes called snapshots. Snapshots only store the deltas from the previous snapshot, and all the work to create one is done by AWS, not the server it is attached to.
This guy didn't read the docs and did not use AWS snapshots. It was the equivalent of not having a backup strategy for your local hard drive.
Re: "Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data"
#7The Amazon EBS page states (which the author quotes):
> As an example, volumes that operate with 20 GB or less of modified data since their most recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume. This compares with commodity hard disks that will typically fail with an AFR of around 4%, making EBS volumes 10 times more reliable than typical commodity disk drives.
Nowhere within that does it say 0.00% failure rate, and later in the page they even describe how to mitigate the risk of losing data due to disk failure using snapshots, mirrored across availability zones.
Re: "Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data"
#8> "expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% –0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume"
Well, I think the OP has just experienced a sample from a probability distribution characterized above.
Re: "Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data"
#9At least you didn't have to pay thousands of dollars to delete your data!
Re: "Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data"
#10Why is this on HN? AWS provides a great way to back up EBS volumes called snapshots. Snapshots only store the deltas from the previous snapshot, and all the work to create one is done by AWS, not the server it is attached to. This guy didn't read the docs and did not use AWS snapshots. It was the equivalent of not having a backup strategy for your local hard drive.
I agree--this is just noise. The comment in the parent post saying "I run datacenters, and things don't fail" should be crossposted to thedailywtf. EVERYTHING fails. Plan for it.