Why the AWS Crash is a Good Thing. • Hacker News Board

Re: Why the AWS Crash is a Good Thing.

#11

Post by mchusma » Fri, Apr 22, 2011, 9:00 PM UTC

bradgessler wrote: post #9

While I agree this is a good thing, the central issue in my mind is that AWS lead a lot of folks to believe that spanning their application across multiple availability zones was a way to protect against AWS's own failures. They spoke at YC a few months back and recommended this as a primary strategy for dealing with failure. None of their engineers or staff recommended spanning applications across different physical…

Some of this is evolving, but if it turns out AWS mislead people you are right.

Re: Why the AWS Crash is a Good Thing.

#12

Post by eof » Fri, Apr 22, 2011, 10:28 PM UTC

s/Why/How/

Re: Why the AWS Crash is a Good Thing.

#13

Post by samatman » Fri, Apr 22, 2011, 10:29 PM UTC

Animus7 wrote: post #2

100% uptime is possible, and it's possible today. Nobody complains that their torrents are ever "down". So to correct: 100% uptime is not possible... with a central point of failure such as a datacenter.

Ironically enough, I have an... interesting service provider at this location who aggressively throttles peer connections. I've been using torrific as a workaround, which, in turn, uses AWS.

So yes. My torrents are "down".

Re: Why the AWS Crash is a Good Thing.

#14

Post by gcb » Fri, Apr 22, 2011, 11:27 PM UTC

> Why the AWS Crash is a Good Thing

because it didn't happen with me.

Re: Why the AWS Crash is a Good Thing.

#15

Post by shanecox1 » Fri, Apr 22, 2011, 11:36 PM UTC

blhack wrote: post #8

Twitter goes down all the time, sure, facebook has dropped off, yeah... But neither of these things have ever happened for a full day. If twitter goes out, refreshing a few times (this was true even a couple of years ago when the downtime was really bad) usually lets you get through. The worst I remember seeing was a few hours down. Same goes for facebook. The worst I can recall right now is part of the oauth system…

I expect large companies will rethink scalability and not put all eggs in one basket.

Re: Why the AWS Crash is a Good Thing.

#16

Post by Animus7 » Fri, Apr 22, 2011, 11:58 PM UTC

samatman wrote: post #13

Animus7 wrote: post #2

100% uptime is possible, and it's possible today. Nobody complains that their torrents are ever "down". So to correct: 100% uptime is not possible... with a central point of failure such as a datacenter.

Ironically enough, I have an... interesting service provider at this location who aggressively throttles peer connections. I've been using torrific as a workaround, which, in turn, uses AWS. So yes. My torrents are "down".

Your torrents aren't "down". In the same sense that having a theoretical crappy ISP that blocks GMail doesn't mean your GMail is "down".

When we talk about downtime we usually mean a global outage, for most everyone.

That's what happened at Amazon. This never happens for an active torrent. And it's all by design.

Re: Why the AWS Crash is a Good Thing.

#17

Post by dhughes » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 4:12 AM UTC

How much do organizations such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Hacker News etc. plan ahead for holidays such as Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Mother's Day, or the last day of school, first day of University?

It seems most outages could at least be predicted somewhat just by looking at "cultural patterns", for lack of a better phrase, from my perspective a lot of outages seem to occur during the events I mentioned.

Add to that most people and resources may not be available as much or as quickly during the days when it's busier making it even more likely something will happen.