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Amazon was Down

amazon.com

91–100 of 103 posts

Re: Amazon was Down

#91
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon.com retail website does not run on AWS.

It runs 100% 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.

Judging from alpb's post, they either currently work there, or did in the past. "retail website" being the key phrase used frequently internally to Amazon.

Re: Amazon was Down

#92
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK the "Amazon runs on AWS" meme was originally a line of pure marketing tripe.

Incorrect, Amazon.com runs on AWS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5588012

AWS tech maybe, but you can be pretty assured that the data centers (or at least networks) are are almost completely segregated.

Re: Amazon was Down

#93
post #73
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon.com retail website does not run on AWS.

Amazon.com website actually runs on AWS for last 2-3 years.

It sure didn't when I was there three years ago, but maybe they moved quickly.

Re: Amazon was Down

#94
post #88
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, apparently that last comment really hit a nerve, as several people decided to downvote it, but not a single person actually refuted any of what I said. I was under the impression that downvotes were more to be used against trolling or flamebaiting, and not just opinions that people disagreed with. Considering everything I said is quite easy to verify as being true, this downvoting just strikes me as kind of inte…

Yeah, I think there's a misunderstanding somewhere. Some people think I believe a $5 computer could handle amazon.com's traffic, which is clearly preposterous.

I know that almost all of my downtime comes from when I overengineer things. And I don't need to "patch my kernel" because my OS doesn't have kernel holes once a week. Linux isn't the only Unix OS out there.

Today, a lot of sysadmins believe that "LAMP" is a synonym for webserver, and consequently there are a bunch of webservers serving static content on a machine with way too many moving parts. Complexity is bad.

"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler." -- Albert Einstein

Re: Amazon was Down

#95
post #29

It's a lesson in overengineering. At this point my $5 Pentium 3 server has a greater uptime than Amazon.

Unless your server needs to handle comparable amounts of traffic, it's not the same thing.

It doesn't. My server is appropriately engineered to its task.

Re: Amazon was Down

#96
post #83
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I doubt many would leave Amazon permanently because of a service outage, but it probably does cost them something in impulse purchases, if the impulsive desire for the item passes during the downtime.

No, you would think that, but actually if you read the comment referenced above, what they actually found is that outages seem to have little effect on revenues. That's why it's so surprising, really. The implication seems to be that their customers don't actually spend a whole lot on impulse buys.

Re: Amazon was Down

#97
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heroku is up: http://cl.ly/image/0B0U1K3Z342R . Conversely, when AWS had issues, Amazon.com was not impacted. Amazon.com != AWS. I'm curious to know when AWS or Amazon.com innovations impact each other, or which one leads. I'd rather it be Amazon.com.

Apparently, Amazon.com switched to AWS in 2011 http://www.quora.com/Amazon/Does-Amazon-com-use-Amazon-AWS .

I was at the AWS Summit in NYC last week and Werner claims that they only completed the transition of retail to AWS fairly recently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo1W92Teqx4

Re: Amazon was Down

#98
post #88
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, apparently that last comment really hit a nerve, as several people decided to downvote it, but not a single person actually refuted any of what I said. I was under the impression that downvotes were more to be used against trolling or flamebaiting, and not just opinions that people disagreed with. Considering everything I said is quite easy to verify as being true, this downvoting just strikes me as kind of inte…

I think the downvotes are because your post is somewhat off topic.

OP responded to "Amazon.com is down" with "this is a lesson in over-engineering" - which it isn't, because Amazon.com is most certainly not overengineered for its purpose (I've seen the code with my own two eyes).

Your response is "not everyone needs extensively engineered systems", which is true, but is a non-sequitor from the previous posts.

Re: Amazon was Down

#99

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 ]

This is true by my experience. I went online last night to buy a replacement garden hose. Was surprised Amazon was down. After confirming it wasn't just me (thanks isitdownforeveryoneorjustme.com), I gave up and ordered it this morning.

Re: Amazon was Down

#100
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Tumblr and Twitter have orders of magnitude fewer users than Amazon.

Seeing that Twitter has 500 million users, an order of magnitude more would be in the range of 5 billion, and a second order of magnitude would be around 50 billion.

So I seriously doubt Amazon has "orders of magnitude more users" that Twitter. For Tumblr, maybe, but I doubt that too (maybe just one order of magnitude for it).

Besides, all that's orthogonal to my point. Except if you mean that the reason that Twitter and Tumblr have less users than Amazon is that they left those services due to outages.

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