281–290 of 1001 posts
“Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1. We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.” It’s always DNS.
As this incident unfolds, what’s the best way to estimate how many additional hours it’s likely to last? My intuition is that the expected remaining duration increases the longer the outage persists, but that would ultimately depend on the historical distribution of similar incidents. Is that kind of data available anywhere?
To my understanding the main problem is DynamoDB being down, and DynamoDB is what a lot of AWS services use for their eventing systems behind the scenes. So there's probably like 500 billion unprocessed events that'll need to get processed even when they get everything back online. It's gonna be a long one.
Their status page ( https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status ) says the only disrupted service is DynamoDB, but it's impacting 37 other services. It is amazing to see how big a blast radius a single service can have.
AWS engineers are trained to use their internal services for each new system. They seem to like using DynamoDB. Dependencies like this should be made transparent.
A lot of AWS services under the hood depend on others, and especially us-east-1 is often used for things that require strong consistency like AWS console logins/etc (where you absolutely don't want a changed password or revoked session to remain valid in other regions because of eventual consistency).
Their status page ( https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status ) says the only disrupted service is DynamoDB, but it's impacting 37 other services. It is amazing to see how big a blast radius a single service can have.
In the coming hours/days we'll find out if AWS still have significant single points of failure in that region, or if _so many companies_ are just not bothering to build in redundancy to mitigate regional outages.
I'm looking forward to the RCA!
"Do we enable DR? Yes/No". That's all you can do. If you do, it's a whole machinery starting, which might take longer than the outage itself.
They can't even use Slack to communicate - messages are being dropped/not sent.
And then we laugh at the South Koreans for not having backed up their hard drives (which got burnt by actual fire, a statistically way less occurring event than an AWS outage). OK that's a huge screw up, but hey, this is not insignificant either.
What will happen now? Nothing, like nothing happened after Crowdstrike's bug last year.