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AWS us-east-1 down

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81–90 of 331 posts

Re: AWS us-east-1 down

#81
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AZs don't really help when it's AWS' own services across the entire region that break. Anecdotally, we have had customers accept outages that were out of our control without penalty.

Wild, that wouldn't have flown with datacenter providers having issues for my previous companies. AWS really does have an easier time than old school datacenter providers. I guess the complexity is higher but it's shocking that they can charge so much yet we hold them to a lower standard.

Outage rates are also wildly different. When you're using dozens of managed services and have a few prod-impacting outages with any reasonable (cross-AZ) design, customers are less sensitive then when they are dependent on dozens of products that hav independent failure modes with potentially cascading impact.

Re: AWS us-east-1 down

#82

Why does everyone keep deploying their products to this one region when it always seems like the one that fails? We don't use big cloud were I work, so maybe I'm missing something. Does East-1 offer something other don't?

I used it because early on in the project I wanted to use features for IoT that were only available on us-east-1 initially, as well as lambda@edge which was on us-east-1 only at the time.

Re: AWS us-east-1 down

#83

Why does everyone keep deploying their products to this one region when it always seems like the one that fails? We don't use big cloud were I work, so maybe I'm missing something. Does East-1 offer something other don't?

There are some services (cloudfront for example) which require this region. Its not that much harder to have multiple regions in your deployment but putting everything in one is simpler for smaller startupy orgs.

Re: AWS us-east-1 down

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also usually extremely US-centric. Nobody outside of North America has any idea what "PDT" or "Mountain Time" means.

I mostly struggle with Irish Standard Time (used for DST in Ireland) and Indian Standard Time which have the same acronym. :( Thankfully, I learnt a long time ago to use ISO 8601 and UTC for dates and times. I still revert to PST/PDT if my audience is primarily left coast based.

And I can't say it's ever actually caused a problem, but something about Indian Standard Time being a half-hour offset from UTC has always bothered me so much... But now we're fully off-topic.

Re: AWS us-east-1 down

#87

The second law of thermodynamics guarantees that there will always / eventually be downtime… and that’s okay. Design for downtime. Shameless self-plug for https://heiioncall.com/ for free website / HTTP endpoint monitoring and cron job monitoring if you want to know about your own app’s downtime. EDIT: thanks to those of you who have signed up in the past few minutes! Let us know if you have any feedback.

"eventually" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Our sun will last another 5 billion years, and the heat death is something like 100 trillion years away.

Re: AWS us-east-1 down

#88

Why is it always us-east-1 though? I have always stayed away from that region because it seems significantly less reliable than other regions.

I thought I read that this is where they deploy new changes first. Can anyone confirm?

From observing my wife's teams over the years, they deploy new _products_ early to that region, but deploying code changes starts in smaller regions.

Re: AWS us-east-1 down

#89

Toast POS is down 100%, don't go out to lunch.

As a side note, I wonder if businesses won't even accept cash if they can't go through their POS system. If not, it's a shame that these modern internet connected POSs lock out stuff like that.

Re: AWS us-east-1 down

#90
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild, that wouldn't have flown with datacenter providers having issues for my previous companies. AWS really does have an easier time than old school datacenter providers. I guess the complexity is higher but it's shocking that they can charge so much yet we hold them to a lower standard.

DCs are pretty static and offer way fewer services than AWS or any other public cloud. I worked for one for some time and whenever we had issues, some people would call and ask if we were going bankrupt. It gave me a feeling they also have way smaller customers that might not understand the underlying stack.

If all you use in AWS is static EC2 instances you would have to go back a looooong time to find an outage which affected their availability. Even in us-east-1.
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