Amazon EC2 currently down. Affecting Heroku, Reddit, Others • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon EC2 currently down. Affecting Heroku, Reddit, Others

#231

Post by xenophanes » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 11:14 PM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #154

macrael wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of thinking is poisonous. I know it's in good fun and it's fun to look for connections in things, but it is actually preposterous to think that Amazon would purposely disrupt wide swaths of highly paying customers for much of a day to bury one story about bad customer relations. My guess is there are a lot of people working very hard to try and solve this problem right now, let's not belittle their efforts…

It was a joke. I made the same joke earlier today. No-one is seriously going to believe this.

He knows you were joking. It's a bad joke. "It's a joke" is not a magic bullet that means you can do no wrong.

Poisonous ideas spread as jokes. That is one of the ways they spread. A person thinking well about the issue wouldn't find the joke funny because it doesn't make sense. The joke relies on some poisonous, bad thinking to be understood. It has bad assumptions, and a bad way of looking at the world, built in.

Re: Amazon EC2 currently down. Affecting Heroku, Reddit, Others

#232

Post by pardner » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 11:15 PM UTC

JackWebbHeller wrote: post #187

taligent wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN really needs to hold a "dumbest comments of the year" award. This has to be a strong contender.

HN really needs to hold a "snarkiest response of the year" award.

Snap!

Re: Amazon EC2 currently down. Affecting Heroku, Reddit, Others

#233

Post by justplay » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 11:16 PM UTC

i read in my book that amazon is the best cloud service provider and seeing this thing can't really prove it. I am still confused which cloud service i use ? Amazon is only one which Indians are currently rely on ,since latency is bit smaller for amazon servers as compared to other providers.

Re: Amazon EC2 currently down. Affecting Heroku, Reddit, Others

#234

Post by jbarham » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 11:16 PM UTC

FWIW here's Google App Engine status page: http://code.google.com/status/appengine

Re: Amazon EC2 currently down. Affecting Heroku, Reddit, Others

#235

Post by robbiet480 » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 11:18 PM UTC

I made this to express my outrage and hope to help others easily express theirs too! http://robbiet480.github.com/StopLyingToUsAmazon/

Re: Amazon EC2 currently down. Affecting Heroku, Reddit, Others

#236

Post by gazarsgo » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 11:22 PM UTC

donrhummy wrote: post #185

diego wrote: post #31

The N. Virginia datacenter has been historically unreliable. I moved my personal projects to the West Coast (Oregon and N. California) and I have seen no significant issues in the past year. N. Virginia is both cheaper and closer to the center of mass of the developed world. I'm surprised Amazon hasn't managed to make it more reliable.

I don't understand why anyone's site is only in one datacenter. i thought the point of AWS was that it was distributed with fault tolerance? Why don't they distribute all the sites/apps across all their centers?

heroku only uses one AZ, apparently. Which is completely awful, for a PaaS...

Re: Amazon EC2 currently down. Affecting Heroku, Reddit, Others

#237

Post by d0m » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 11:23 PM UTC

Ironically, on the first hacking health event, our server was running heroku.. and heroku went down. 3 months later, we have the second hacking health in Toronto and all AWS is going down.

Re: Amazon EC2 currently down. Affecting Heroku, Reddit, Others

#238

Post by jeremyjh » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 11:24 PM UTC

darkarmani wrote: post #161

res0nat0r wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many large sites which aren't properly architecting their infrastructure to deal with the commodity nature of the cloud.

Including companies like Amazon that aren't properly architecting their control plane.

They should outsource it.

Re: Amazon EC2 currently down. Affecting Heroku, Reddit, Others

#239

Post by gphil » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 11:24 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #212

pg wrote: post #192

Convenient that we're too backward to use AWS. That means everyone can at least talk about it here when AWS is down.

I wish that DNS could just switch over to another availability zone when this happens. A datacenter with all the sql replicated. Sure you'd pay twice as much for EBS, but it could also double as a backup. As for the other resources at the availability zone, they are hardly utilized until they spring into action (EC2, etc.)

"...but it could also double as a backup."

Take care when treating a high-availability set up such as this as a back up: if you are replicating all the changes between 2 database servers and an application error (e.g. not a database outage) causes some kind of data corruption, you are hosed if the corruption replicates and you don't also have some previous "snapshot" of the data that you can roll back to.

Re: Amazon EC2 currently down. Affecting Heroku, Reddit, Others

#240

Post by gfodor » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 11:26 PM UTC

w_t_payne wrote: post #108

gfodor wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you go through the pains of architecting your system to span multiple AZs, or you avoid using EBS, then you probably dodge most of the EC2 outages. (Remains to be seen if that is the case here.) That said, I don't think most people think using the cloud means that downtime is a thing of the past. I think the more attractive proposition is when hardware breaks, or meteors hit the datacenter, etc, it is their proble…

Yeah. Even with this, they still do better than I would. My record: misconfigured air-conditioning unit alarm leading to servers being baked at high temperature over a weekend, leading to much wailing and gnashing of teeth. I now know to be really careful to set up air conditioning units properly, but what other lessons am I still waiting to learn? The main lesson that I took from this is that I should stick to what…

Yeah this is another important point. Part of the cost of AWS is also a bit of an insurance policy against you physically breaking your servers :)