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

Amazon Web Services are down

status.aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 346 posts

Re: Amazon Web Services are down

#51

Post by mathrawka »

jedberg wrote: post #34
mathrawka wrote: post #23

I think this is a good example of how the "cloud" is not a silver bullet to making your site always up. AWS provides a way to keep it up, but it is up to each developer to ensure that they are using AWS in a way to make sure their site can handle problems in one availability zone. I think we will see more of a focus from big users of AWS about focusing on how to create a redundant service using AWS. Or at least I hop…

This outage is affecting all AZ's in the East. So even a multizone setup wouldn't help for this one. Only a multiregion setup. This outage is a lot like having your entire datacenter lose power.

I thought AZs were supposed to be different physical data centers.

If that is not the case, then having a multi-region setup would be a necessity for any major sites on AWS.

Perhaps there will be a time where to truly be redundant, one would need to use multiple cloud providers. Which would be a _huge_ pain to do now I imagine, with all the provider lock-ins we have.

Re: Amazon Web Services are down

#53

Post by dangrossman »

justinsb wrote: post #9
mechanical_fish wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be incorrect. We have problem children in us-east-1b, -1c, and -1d.

AWS randomize the zones per account, so "your" -1b is not necessarily the same as "my" -1b. I'm only seeing problems in my -1c. Are you seeing 3 zones failing all under the same account? If multiple AZs are down, AWS are going to have some serious explaining to do...

Amazon RDS's most expensive feature is automatic, instant Multi-AZ failover to protect against this kind of situation. It's not working quite like that, which the AWS status page acknowledges. This is a major failure.

Re: Amazon Web Services are down

#55

Post by jedberg »

dsl wrote: post #46

4/21/2011 is "Judgement Day" when Skynet becomes self aware and tries to kill us all. http://terminator.wikia.com/wiki/2011/04/21 I am just a little freaked out right now.

Don't worry. If skynet is in EC2, we'll be fine.

Re: Amazon Web Services are down

#56

Post by jedberg »

mathrawka wrote: post #51
jedberg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This outage is affecting all AZ's in the East. So even a multizone setup wouldn't help for this one. Only a multiregion setup. This outage is a lot like having your entire datacenter lose power.

I thought AZs were supposed to be different physical data centers. If that is not the case, then having a multi-region setup would be a necessity for any major sites on AWS. Perhaps there will be a time where to truly be redundant, one would need to use multiple cloud providers. Which would be a _huge_ pain to do now I imagine, with all the provider lock-ins we have.

> I thought AZs were supposed to be different physical data centers.

They are. Which means this is probably a software issue or some other systemic issue.

Re: Amazon Web Services are down

#57

Post by muppetman »

hendi_ wrote: post #50
muppetman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! It's like those dumb people that rent out 5 floors of a 100 story building, instead of building their own SkyScraper. Then, horror of horrors, 2 of the 8 lifts breaks down for 12 hours. Such idiots for paying rent, even though building SkyScrapers isn't their core business.

Poor analogy; if the lifts break, just use the stairs. Note that I've written "relying", as in "depending on the cloud without any alternative backup". Depending on the cloud means depending on something you cannot influence.

Ok, it's a bomb scare and the building's shutdown for 12 hours.

How I was supposed to get ' "relying", as in "depending on the cloud without any alternative backup" ' from what your originally wrote, I don't know.

Re: Amazon Web Services are down

#59

Post by jedberg »

hendi_ wrote: post #45
jedberg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying "yay for relying on a datacenter"

Note that I've written "relying", not "hosting", meaning I'm well aware of the fact that using "the cloud" as an additional layer of capacity can be a good thing. But relying on the cloud means that you're giving up control. Power outage in your data center? Buy diesel generators next time! Faulty network card? Put in two redundant ones! AWS down? Wait and pray!

Go back to the building metaphor. Building datacenters is not our core business, so we outsource it. Much like building a building is not our core business, nor running a telephone system, so we outsource those things too. All business critical, but still outsourced.
Post reply on HN