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How when AWS was down, we were not

authress.io

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Re: How when AWS was down, we were not

#3
post #2

This is a rare case where the original bait-y title is probably better than the de-bait-ified title, because the actual article is much less of a brag and much more of an actual case study.

Re-how'd, plus I've resisted the temptation to insert a comma that feels missing to me.

Re: How when AWS was down, we were not

#4
> During this time, us-east-1 was offline, and while we only run a limited amount of infrastructure in the region, we have to run it there because we have customers who want it there

> [Our service can only go down] five minutes and 15 seconds per year.

I don't have much experience in this area, so please correct me if I'm mistaken:

Don't these two quotes together imply that they have failed to deliver on their SLA for the subset of their customers that want their service in us-east-1? I understand the customers won't be mad at them in this case, since us-east-1 itself is down, but I feel like their title is incorrect. Some subset of their service is running on top of AWS. When AWS goes down, that subset of their service is down. When AWS was down, it seems like they were also down for some customers.

Re: How when AWS was down, we were not

#5
post #3
post #2

This is a rare case where the original bait-y title is probably better than the de-bait-ified title, because the actual article is much less of a brag and much more of an actual case study.

Re-how'd, plus I've resisted the temptation to insert a comma that feels missing to me.

"How?! When AWS was down: we were not!"

Re: How when AWS was down, we were not

#6

> During this time, us-east-1 was offline, and while we only run a limited amount of infrastructure in the region, we have to run it there because we have customers who want it there > [Our service can only go down] five minutes and 15 seconds per year. I don't have much experience in this area, so please correct me if I'm mistaken: Don't these two quotes together imply that they have failed to deliver on their SLA f…

The bulk of the article discusses their failover strategy, where they detect failures in a region and how they route requests to a backup region, and how to deal with data consistency and cost issues arising from that.

Re: How when AWS was down, we were not

#7

> During this time, us-east-1 was offline, and while we only run a limited amount of infrastructure in the region, we have to run it there because we have customers who want it there > [Our service can only go down] five minutes and 15 seconds per year. I don't have much experience in this area, so please correct me if I'm mistaken: Don't these two quotes together imply that they have failed to deliver on their SLA f…

Depends on what the SLA phrasing is - us-east-1 affinity is a requirement put forth by some customers so I would totally expect the SLA to specifically state it’s subject to us-east-1 availability. Essentially these customers are opting out of Authress’s fault-tolerant infrastructure and the SLA should be clear about that.

Re: How when AWS was down, we were not

#10

> During this time, us-east-1 was offline, and while we only run a limited amount of infrastructure in the region, we have to run it there because we have customers who want it there > [Our service can only go down] five minutes and 15 seconds per year. I don't have much experience in this area, so please correct me if I'm mistaken: Don't these two quotes together imply that they have failed to deliver on their SLA f…

Depends on what the SLA phrasing is - us-east-1 affinity is a requirement put forth by some customers so I would totally expect the SLA to specifically state it’s subject to us-east-1 availability. Essentially these customers are opting out of Authress’s fault-tolerant infrastructure and the SLA should be clear about that.

As TFA states, we have to offer services in that region because that's where some users are as well. However, the core of services are not in that region. I have also suggested when the time comes for offering SLAs, that there is explicit wording exempting us-east-1.
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