491–500 of 1001 posts
I realize that my basement servers have better uptime than AWS this year! I think most sysadmin don't plan for AWS outage. And economically it makes sense. But it makes me wonder, is sysadmin a lost art?
I dunno, let me ask chatgpt. Hmmm, it said yes.
Every week or so we interview a company and ask them if they have a fall-back plan in case AWS goes down or their cloud account disappears. They always have this deer-in-the-headlights look. 'That can't happen, right?' Now imagine for a bit that it will never come back up. See where that leads you. The internet got its main strengths from the fact that it was completely decentralized. We've been systematically erodin…
Planning for an AWS outage is a complete waste of time and energy for most companies. Yes it does happen but very rarely to the tune of a few hours every 5-10 years. I can almost guarantee that whatever plans you have won’t get you fully operational faster than just waiting for AWS to fix it.
AWS US-East 1 has many outages. Anything significant should account for that.
Just a couple of days ago in this HN thread [0] there were quite some users claiming Hetzner is not an options as their uptime isn't as good as AWS, hence the higher AWS pricing is worth the investment. Oh, the irony. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614922
Aws/cloud has similar outages too, but more redundancy and automatic failover/migrations that are transparent to customers happen. You don't have to worry about DDOS and many other admin burdens either.
YMMV, I'm just saying sometimes Aws makes sense, other times Hetzner does.
Obviously, some services are only available in us-east-1, but many applications can gain some resiliency just by making a primary home in any other region.
US-East-1 is more than just a normal region. It also provides the backbone for other services, including those in other regions. Thus simply being in another region doesn’t protect you from the consistent us-east-1 shenanigans. AWS doesn’t talk about that much publicly, but if you press them they will admit in private that there are some pretty nasty single points of failure in the design of AWS that can materialize…
I thought that if us-east-1 goes down you might not be able to administer (or bring up new services) in other zones, but if you have services running that can take over from us-east-1, you can maintain your app/website etc.
I haven’t had to do this for several years but that was my experience a few years ago on an outage - obviously it depends on the services you’re using.
You can’t start cloning things to other zones after us-east-1 is down - you’ve left it too late
It shouldn’t, but it does. As a civilization, we’ve eliminated resilience wherever we could, because it’s more cost-effective. Resilience is expensive. So everything is resting on a giant pile of single point of failures. Maybe this is the event to get everyone off of piling everything onto us-east-1 and hoping for the best, but the last few outages didn’t, so I don’t expect this one to, either.
Potentially-ignoramus comment here, apologies in advance, but amazon.com itself appears to be fine right now. Perhaps slower to load pages, by about half a second. Are they not eating (much of) their own dog food?
US-East-1 is more than just a normal region. It also provides the backbone for other services, including those in other regions. Thus simply being in another region doesn’t protect you from the consistent us-east-1 shenanigans. AWS doesn’t talk about that much publicly, but if you press them they will admit in private that there are some pretty nasty single points of failure in the design of AWS that can materialize…
>US-East-1 is more than just a normal region. It also provides the backbone for other services, including those in other regions I thought that if us-east-1 goes down you might not be able to administer (or bring up new services) in other zones, but if you have services running that can take over from us-east-1, you can maintain your app/website etc. I haven’t had to do this for several years but that was my experien…
It just goes to show the difference between best practices in cloud computing, and what everyone ends up doing in reality, including well known industry names.
Well, inter-region DR/HA is a expensive thing to ensure (whether on salaries, infra or both), specially when you are in AWS.