Working around the EC2 outage • Hacker News Board

Re: Working around the EC2 outage

#11

Post by shykes » Thu, Apr 21, 2011, 10:36 PM UTC

pan69 wrote: post #3

ulope wrote: post #2

Having read that (and assuming it's accurate) I really wonder how anyone in their right mind can see EC2 as a viable hosting solution.

EC2 is built for scalability and distributed systems. The article seems to give a negative spin on something which is the authors own fault. In most traditional hosting environments you have e.g. one web server. If this one server goes down your website stops working. A solution would be to have two web servers behind a load balancer. If one web server goes down, the other takes over and your site continues to work.…

With EC2 you have to ability to set up a website that never goes down.

I find it hard to believe that you have any practical experience to back your claim. Today's incident affected sites that scrupulously respected all HA best practice.

Re: Working around the EC2 outage

#12

Post by jpetazzo » Thu, Apr 21, 2011, 10:44 PM UTC

pan69 wrote: post #7

samstokes wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing AWS regions with AWS availability zones . You're not technically wrong - it is possible to have your application spread across regions and doing so would have protected against this outage - but doing so is slow and expensive, and the actual failover to a different region is difficult. Amazon explicitly recommends that if you distribute across multiple availability zones within the same region, you s…

No, I'm not confusing regions with availability zones. What I'm saying is that AWS gives you all the components to set up a website that never goes down. If you don't take advantage of this then there is no else to blame but yourself. Of course doing this can be very expensive and it's choice you have to make. Some people keep saying things like; "Well, Amazon promised us that zones don't have a single point of failu…

Amazon promised that regions wouldn't see two zones going down at the same time. That's totally different, and that's what happened today.

Re: Working around the EC2 outage

#13

Post by pan69 » Thu, Apr 21, 2011, 11:00 PM UTC

jpetazzo wrote: post #12

pan69 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not confusing regions with availability zones. What I'm saying is that AWS gives you all the components to set up a website that never goes down. If you don't take advantage of this then there is no else to blame but yourself. Of course doing this can be very expensive and it's choice you have to make. Some people keep saying things like; "Well, Amazon promised us that zones don't have a single point of failu…

Amazon promised that regions wouldn't see two zones going down at the same time. That's totally different, and that's what happened today.

"Amazon promised"

Well, that just sounds incredibly naive.

Re: Working around the EC2 outage

#14

Post by shykes » Thu, Apr 21, 2011, 11:06 PM UTC

pan69 wrote: post #7

samstokes wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing AWS regions with AWS availability zones . You're not technically wrong - it is possible to have your application spread across regions and doing so would have protected against this outage - but doing so is slow and expensive, and the actual failover to a different region is difficult. Amazon explicitly recommends that if you distribute across multiple availability zones within the same region, you s…

No, I'm not confusing regions with availability zones. What I'm saying is that AWS gives you all the components to set up a website that never goes down. If you don't take advantage of this then there is no else to blame but yourself. Of course doing this can be very expensive and it's choice you have to make. Some people keep saying things like; "Well, Amazon promised us that zones don't have a single point of failu…

Why don't you expose how you would go about designing this invincible website? We are all very eager to learn from you.

Re: Working around the EC2 outage

#15

Post by mbailey » Thu, Apr 21, 2011, 11:07 PM UTC

Quick answer: have presence in both the VA and CA locations.

Re: Working around the EC2 outage

#16

Post by markerdmann » Thu, Apr 21, 2011, 11:10 PM UTC

pan69 wrote: post #13

jpetazzo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon promised that regions wouldn't see two zones going down at the same time. That's totally different, and that's what happened today.

"Amazon promised" Well, that just sounds incredibly naive.

Ok, come on. Now you're just trolling. Amazon also promises not to share your credit card information. It should be obvious that trust is necessary in business.

Re: Working around the EC2 outage

#17

Post by shykes » Thu, Apr 21, 2011, 11:36 PM UTC

mbailey wrote: post #15

Quick answer: have presence in both the VA and CA locations.

The corollary is: ignore the AZ feature entirely. You may be right, but that's a big hit to the attractiveness of AWS.

Re: Working around the EC2 outage

#18

Post by e40 » Thu, Apr 21, 2011, 11:41 PM UTC

pan69 wrote: post #13

jpetazzo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon promised that regions wouldn't see two zones going down at the same time. That's totally different, and that's what happened today.

"Amazon promised" Well, that just sounds incredibly naive.

Would you just please tell everyone here how you think it should be done rather than talking around the issue?? Otherwise, you're just another troll.

Re: Working around the EC2 outage

#19

Post by sbov » Fri, Apr 22, 2011, 12:19 AM UTC

pan69 wrote: post #3

ulope wrote: post #2

Having read that (and assuming it's accurate) I really wonder how anyone in their right mind can see EC2 as a viable hosting solution.

EC2 is built for scalability and distributed systems. The article seems to give a negative spin on something which is the authors own fault. In most traditional hosting environments you have e.g. one web server. If this one server goes down your website stops working. A solution would be to have two web servers behind a load balancer. If one web server goes down, the other takes over and your site continues to work.…

At least according to the blog post, it seems like part of the issue may be a stampede of requests due to the complete outtage of a single AZ. If every single service hosted in the Amazon cloud did some sort of solution where they did failover to another Region in the case of multiple AZ outtages, how can we be sure that that stampede of requests wouldn't take out that other region? Could Amazon handle the entirety of the US East workload being dumped onto Europe/US West?

Re: Working around the EC2 outage

#20

Post by snehalpatel » Fri, Apr 22, 2011, 1:00 AM UTC

ulope wrote: post #2

Having read that (and assuming it's accurate) I really wonder how anyone in their right mind can see EC2 as a viable hosting solution.

Choosing to be on AWS or any other cloud provider means you accept some risk of things going down. Build to fail and when that fails, it all comes down to whether or not you can do it better and how much cost you're willing to bear to get to your goal of HA. For me, I know AWS can do a better job at hosting than I can and can accept multiple AZs going down.