81–90 of 103 posts
At an estimated loss of $31,000 per minute http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9962010-7.html?tag=nefd.to... I'm blown away that I see Amazon goes down so often. That certainly, in my mind, doesn't bode well for the brand of AWS.
Most of those are surely done later, perhaps they lose some impulsive buys though.
At an estimated loss of $31,000 per minute http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9962010-7.html?tag=nefd.to... I'm blown away that I see Amazon goes down so often. That certainly, in my mind, doesn't bode well for the brand of AWS.
Amazon.com retail website does not run on AWS.
Not all of amazon runs on AWS though, since they use a service oriented architecture, but many of the services also run on AWS.
A while ago, someone claiming to have worked at Amazon said that downtime doesn't really affect things as much as you'd think. He said most people simply just come back later. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147461 [Edit: That being said, there's also the statistic that every 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1%. Imagine what 20+ minutes of "latency" would do. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273900 ]
> A while ago, someone claiming to have worked at Amazon said that downtime doesn't really affect things as much as you'd think. He said most people simply just come back later. Brick and mortar stores found that out ages ago. They were closed for large parts of the day/night and the customers just came back the next day. If people didn't leave Tumblr and Twitter, with their constant massive outages (at some point in…
Somewhat off-topic: my (limited) experience with Amazon Prime video suggests it's significantly less reliable than Netflix or iTunes (neither of which are stupendously reliable, but I'd say Netflix is by far the most reliable of the three). Hulu might actually be worse than Amazon Prime.
1: http://gigaom.com/2012/12/25/christmas-eve-aws-outage-stings...
Somewhat off-topic: my (limited) experience with Amazon Prime video suggests it's significantly less reliable than Netflix or iTunes (neither of which are stupendously reliable, but I'd say Netflix is by far the most reliable of the three). Hulu might actually be worse than Amazon Prime.
I don't know if you saw this posted on HN, but Netflix test their system really well. They use so-called chaos monkey [1] that shuts down random servers on a whim. This allows them to detect and get rid of dependencies, i.e. tolerate failures in other parts of the system. [1] http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html
Somewhat off-topic: my (limited) experience with Amazon Prime video suggests it's significantly less reliable than Netflix or iTunes (neither of which are stupendously reliable, but I'd say Netflix is by far the most reliable of the three). Hulu might actually be worse than Amazon Prime.
I don't know if you saw this posted on HN, but Netflix test their system really well. They use so-called chaos monkey [1] that shuts down random servers on a whim. This allows them to detect and get rid of dependencies, i.e. tolerate failures in other parts of the system. [1] http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html
http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/12/a-closer-look-at-christm...
A while ago, someone claiming to have worked at Amazon said that downtime doesn't really affect things as much as you'd think. He said most people simply just come back later. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147461 [Edit: That being said, there's also the statistic that every 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1%. Imagine what 20+ minutes of "latency" would do. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273900 ]
> A while ago, someone claiming to have worked at Amazon said that downtime doesn't really affect things as much as you'd think. He said most people simply just come back later. Brick and mortar stores found that out ages ago. They were closed for large parts of the day/night and the customers just came back the next day. If people didn't leave Tumblr and Twitter, with their constant massive outages (at some point in…
Contrast that with going to Amazon and finding their site is down or performing poorly; I have never gone to the store to buy something instead. If I was already going to be ordering it online, I was already resigned to waiting a day or two for it to arrive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your $5 Pentium 3 server isn't the largest retail website on the internet making $61 billion a year. Having seen a lot of the code that Amazon runs on, and having seen first-hand the scale that it runs on, I'll say this: it's not perfect, but it's remarkably well-engineered, and a hell of a lot better than most snarky HNers could do.
But that's the point. Most people don't need anything that well-engineered. Compared to more traditional hosting solutions from quality providers, AWS has terrible uptime and at a much higher cost for the same amount of resources. Two VPS'es from two different providers in a simple failover configuration with an anycast DNS solution would be simpler, cheaper, and much more reliable.
A while ago, someone claiming to have worked at Amazon said that downtime doesn't really affect things as much as you'd think. He said most people simply just come back later. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147461 [Edit: That being said, there's also the statistic that every 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1%. Imagine what 20+ minutes of "latency" would do. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273900 ]
I imagine the difference between latency and downtime is that latency tends to occur every time you visit, while by definition, downtime is more rare. In other words, latency provides a bad experience, while downtime provides no experience.
A while ago, someone claiming to have worked at Amazon said that downtime doesn't really affect things as much as you'd think. He said most people simply just come back later. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147461 [Edit: That being said, there's also the statistic that every 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1%. Imagine what 20+ minutes of "latency" would do. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273900 ]
> A while ago, someone claiming to have worked at Amazon said that downtime doesn't really affect things as much as you'd think. He said most people simply just come back later. Brick and mortar stores found that out ages ago. They were closed for large parts of the day/night and the customers just came back the next day. If people didn't leave Tumblr and Twitter, with their constant massive outages (at some point in…