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AWS us-east-1 outage

status.aws.amazon.com

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Re: AWS us-east-1 outage

#321
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem being that often times you can't actually update the status page. Most internal systems are down. We can't even update our product to say it's down, because accessing the product requires a process that is currently dead.

That's why your status page should be completely independent from the services it is monitoring (minus maybe something that automatically updates it). We use a third party to host our status page specifically so that we can update it even if all our systems are down.

I'm not saying you're wrong, or that the status page is architected properly. I'm just speaking to the current situation.

Re: AWS us-east-1 outage

#322

Have folks considered a class-action lawsuit against these blatantly fraudulent SLAs to recoup costs?

In my experience, despite whatever is published, companies will private acknowledge and pay their SLA terms. (Which still only gets you, like, one day's worth of reimbursement if you're lucky.)

Retail SLAs are a small risk compared to the enterprise SLAs where an outage like this could cost Amazon tens of millions. I assume these contracts have discount tiers based on availability and anything below 99% would be a 100% discount for that bill cycle.

Re: AWS us-east-1 outage

#323
This is effecting heroku.

While my heroku apps are currently up, I am unable to push new versions.

Logging in to heroku dashboard (which does work), there is a message pointing to this heroku status incident for "Availability issues with upstream provider in the US region": https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2390

How can there be an outage severe enough to be effecting middleman customers like heroku, but the AWS status page is still all green?!?!

If whoever runs the AWS status page isn't embaressed, they really ought to be.

Re: AWS us-east-1 outage

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made sure our incident response plan includes checking Hacker News and Twitter for actual updates and information. As of right now, this thread and one update from a twitter user, https://twitter.com/SiteRelEnby/status/1468253604876333059 are all we have. I went into disaster recovery mode when I saw our traffic dropped to 0 suddenly at 10:30am ET. That was just the SQS/something else preventing our ELB logs from b…

So as of the time you posted this comment, were other services actually down? The way the 500 shows up, and the AWS status page, makes it sound like "only" the main landing page/mgt console is unavailable, not AWS services.

Yes, they are still publishing lies on their status page. In this thread people are reporting issues with many services. I'm seeing periodic S3 PUT failures for the last 1.5 hours.

Re: AWS us-east-1 outage

#325

I worked at a company that hired an ex-Amazon engineer to work on some cloud projects. Whenever his projects went down, he fought tooth and nail against any suggestion to update the status page. When forced to update the status page, he'd follow up with an extremely long "post-mortem" document that was really just a long winded explanation about why the outage was someone else's fault. He later explained that in his…

I am finding that I have a very bimodal response to "He did it". When I write an RCA or just talk about near misses, I may give you enough details to figure out that Tom was the one who broke it, but I'm not going to say Tom on the record anywhere, with one extremely obvious exception.

If I think Tom has a toxic combination of poor judgement, Dunning-Kruger syndrome, and a hint of narcissism (I'm not sure but I may be repeating myself here), such that he won't listen to reason and he actively steers others into bad situations (and especially if he then disappears when shit hits the fan), then I will nail him to a fucking cross every chance I get. Public shaming is only a tool for getting people to discount advice from a bad actor. If it comes down to a vote between my idea and his, then I'm going to make sure everyone knows that his bets keep biting us in the ass. This guy kinda sounds like the Toxic Tom.

What is important when I turned out to be the cause of the issue is a bit like some court cases. Would a reasonable person in this situation have come to the same conclusion I did? If so, then I'm just the person who lost the lottery. Either way, fixing it for me might fix it for other people. Sometimes the answer is, "I was trying to juggle three things at once and a ball got dropped." If the process dictated those three things then the process is wrong, or the tooling is wrong. If someone was asking me questions we should think about being more pro-active about deflecting them to someone else or asking them to come back in a half hour. Or maybe I shouldn't be trying to watch training videos while babysitting a deployment to production.

If you never say "my bad" then your advice starts to sound like a lecture, and people avoid lectures so then you never get the whole story. Also as an engineer you should know that owning a mistake early on lets you get to what most of us consider the interesting bit of solving the problem instead of talking about feelings for an hour and then using whatever is left of your brain afterward to fix the problem. In fact in some cases you can shut down someone who is about to start a rant (which is funny as hell because they look like their head is about to pop like a balloon when you say, "yep, I broke it, let's move on to how do we fix it?")

Re: AWS us-east-1 outage

#327
post #166

I worked at a company that hired an ex-Amazon engineer to work on some cloud projects. Whenever his projects went down, he fought tooth and nail against any suggestion to update the status page. When forced to update the status page, he'd follow up with an extremely long "post-mortem" document that was really just a long winded explanation about why the outage was someone else's fault. He later explained that in his…

Sometimes, these large companies tack on too much "necessary" incident "remediation" actions with Arbitrary Due Date SLAs that completely wrench any ongoing work. And ongoing, strategically defined ""muh high impact"" projects are what get you promoted, not doing incident remediations. When you get to the level you want, you get to not really give a shit and actually do The Right Thing. However, for all of the engine…

In my experience this is the actual reason for fear of the formal error correction process.

Re: AWS us-east-1 outage

#328

I worked at a company that hired an ex-Amazon engineer to work on some cloud projects. Whenever his projects went down, he fought tooth and nail against any suggestion to update the status page. When forced to update the status page, he'd follow up with an extremely long "post-mortem" document that was really just a long winded explanation about why the outage was someone else's fault. He later explained that in his…

I've worked for Amazon for 4 years, including stints at AWS, and even in my current role my team is involved in LSE's. I've never seen this behavior, the general culture has been find the problem, fix it, and then do root cause analysis to avoid it again.

Jeff himself has said many times in All Hands and in public "Amazon is the best place to fail". Mainly because things will break, it's not that they break that's interesting, it's what you've learned and how you can avoid that problem in the future.

Re: AWS us-east-1 outage

#329
Looks like Kinesis Firehose is either the root cause, or severely impacted:

https://twitter.com/amontalenti/status/1468265799458639877

Segment is publicly reporting issues delivering to Firehose, and one of my company's real-time monitors also triggered for Kinesis Firehose an hour ago.

Update:

By my sniff of it, some “core” APIs are down for S3 and EC2 (e.g. GET/PUT on S3 and node create/delete on EC2). Systems like Kinesis Firehose and DynamoDB rely on these APIs under the hood (“serverless” is just “a server in someone else’s data center”).

Further update:

There is a workaround available for the AWS Console login issue. You can use https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ to get in -- it's just the landing page that is down (because the landing page is in the affected region).

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