Live data from Hacker News

AWS us-east-1 down

news.ycombinator.com

131–140 of 331 posts

Re: AWS us-east-1 down

#131

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.

Sure :)

Though a lot of practical thermal-related causes of electronics failure seem to operate on timescales of years to decades, like electromigration https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration or even just cooling fan bearing failure. And I don’t think it would be a huge stretch to point to electromigration as a case of diffusion, a natural entropy increasing process, re-randomizing the arrangement of atoms within a transistor (and therefore making it fail eventually).

Re: AWS us-east-1 down

#132
post #53

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.

us-east-1 is the largest region, so it is where changes meet scale. It is also a massively complex beast in itself spanning dozens of datacenters with massive amounts of fiber between them. Much more fragile than having everything in a single building and as you scale up the number of components you increase the rate of failure.

No AWS region is in a single building, they aren't amateurs like Azure. Each region is at least 3 AZs, which is at least one physical DC.

Re: AWS us-east-1 down

#135
post #132
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

us-east-1 is the largest region, so it is where changes meet scale. It is also a massively complex beast in itself spanning dozens of datacenters with massive amounts of fiber between them. Much more fragile than having everything in a single building and as you scale up the number of components you increase the rate of failure.

No AWS region is in a single building, they aren't amateurs like Azure. Each region is at least 3 AZs, which is at least one physical DC.

And yet it's AWS that's down.

Re: AWS us-east-1 down

#139
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the: * Largest (DDoS'd most, most complex, scaling issues etc) * Oldest (More time for weird idiosyncrasies to take hold) * Where most testing happens * Where new products are deployed first

1) and 2) certainly apply. 3) and 4) don't. Testing in the largest region is one of the biggest anti-patterns.

AWS doesn't test there last I checked, they roll out to smaller regions first.

Re: AWS us-east-1 down

#140

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?

It has the best latency from Chile and I think from other countries of South America
Post reply on HN