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Amazon EC2 and RDS in US-EAST zone down

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61–70 of 98 posts

Re: Amazon EC2 and RDS in US-EAST zone down

#61
post #26

Worst part of this outage: paying for a multi-az RDS instance and having failover totally, completely, fail.

Did/does your standby replica in another AZ have any instance notifications stating there is a failure? The outage report claims there were just EBS problems in only one AZ.

No, nothing unusual with our standby replica. It's not even clear if it was the standby or our primary that was in the affected AZ.

Multi-AZ RDS does synchronous replication to the standby instance -- I'm guessing something broke in there. Hopefully AWS will update with a post mortem as they usually do. Lots of frustrated MultiAZ RDS customers on their forums.

Re: Amazon EC2 and RDS in US-EAST zone down

#62
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably to prevent folks from all stacking up in a single AZ. Just think if someone posted a blog post saying "I've noticed that EBS performance is far better in 1d vs. 1a"

Yeah, for me, 1d experiences the lowest load of all zones. According to the pricing history for spot instances, 1d experiences the fewest price spikes compared to 1a and 1b. I'd be interested to see if other users have noticed the same thing for their zones.

I find that random(5) is the best performing. For okay but consistent performance, random(5) is decent, but you should definitely avoid random(5) due to high load.

Re: Amazon EC2 and RDS in US-EAST zone down

#64
post #26

Worst part of this outage: paying for a multi-az RDS instance and having failover totally, completely, fail.

That sucks badly. Similar thing happened to me a while ago with a vendor. When your management team summons you to ask why the hell their site is down, you can't point fingers at the vendor if their marketing literature says it doesn't go down. Sticky situation.

Can't you tell management that it isn't as reliable as they claim?

Re: Amazon EC2 and RDS in US-EAST zone down

#65
Individual availability zones can be identified using the API.

   ec2-describe-reserved-instances-offerings --region
will tell you what the zone's identifier is.

After you list the permanent identifiers, you can match them up to find out if your us-east-1a matches my -1d.

This Alestic article shows how to label them all.

[0] "Matching EC2 Availability Zones Across AWS Accounts" http://alestic.com/2009/07/ec2-availability-zones

Re: Amazon EC2 and RDS in US-EAST zone down

#66
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I suspect it's the "all the things you can do with it" part, not the format. Using the SDKs you don't see any of the underlying ugly, anyways.

Thanks for clarifying my statement. Boto ftw.

Re: Amazon EC2 and RDS in US-EAST zone down

#68
post #38

I'm curious why no public paas is multiple AWS region.

1) because AWS East is so much cheaper (and none of us like spending money) 2) AppFog actually is multi region (and multi IaaS as well)

Oregon is same as AWS East, seems to have a smaller set of boxes, have gotten errors in the past about not having any more servers to allocate.

Re: Amazon EC2 and RDS in US-EAST zone down

#69
post #26

Worst part of this outage: paying for a multi-az RDS instance and having failover totally, completely, fail.

I'm paying like 2,300 a month and even something basic like failover isnt working. I'm not happy.

At $2300/month you could redundantly colo or lease VERY powerful servers in 3-4 data centers around the country.
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