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Don't blame Amazon for your lack of redundancy

cloudability.com

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Re: Don't blame Amazon for your lack of redundancy

#11

Post by jodrellblank »

But mostly it’s because the cloud has been so darned reliable.

Or because the cloud has offered such a good value proposition for cheap and easy scaling with demand.

And anyway, it's unfair to rail on people who "should have had a redundancy plan" when the service they pay money for is one with a redundancy service included in it (availability zones) which has unexpectedly also failed.

Our point stands, for engineers to consider all likely scenarios when building redundancy and not assume anyone – even Amazon – can provide 100.0% uptime.

Your point appears to be "If you don't have 100% uptime then it's all your fault and you should have planned for it you lazy idiot, everyone should blame you. Also you can never have 100% uptime so people should stop blaming Amazon.". Do you have more of a point than that?

Re: Don't blame Amazon for your lack of redundancy

#12

Post by matellis »

jodrellblank wrote: post #11

But mostly it’s because the cloud has been so darned reliable. Or because the cloud has offered such a good value proposition for cheap and easy scaling with demand. And anyway, it's unfair to rail on people who "should have had a redundancy plan" when the service they pay money for is one with a redundancy service included in it (availability zones) which has unexpectedly also failed. Our point stands, for engineers…

Our point is it's unfair to blame Amazon 100% when there were viable and affordable ways round this outage. Some of our customers were in US East and had off-site backups, scripted server deployments and were able to get back online pretty quickly.

Re: Don't blame Amazon for your lack of redundancy

#13

Post by matellis »

jodrellblank wrote: post #11

But mostly it’s because the cloud has been so darned reliable. Or because the cloud has offered such a good value proposition for cheap and easy scaling with demand. And anyway, it's unfair to rail on people who "should have had a redundancy plan" when the service they pay money for is one with a redundancy service included in it (availability zones) which has unexpectedly also failed. Our point stands, for engineers…

Cool nick btw.

Re: Don't blame Amazon for your lack of redundancy

#14

Post by mtogo »

matellis wrote: post #10
maratd wrote: post #4

Cloud = Virtualization. Creating redundancy within the same virtual ecosystem is idiotic, as the article points out. Any hardware or virtualization software failure would throw your redundancy out the window. You need to have your virtual eggs in very different baskets, in different geographical locations, with different providers.

+1 We agree.

There's an upvote button for that.

Re: Don't blame Amazon for your lack of redundancy

#17

Post by fvbock »

cabalamat wrote: post #15

But do blame Amazon for Amazon's lack of redundancy.

i agree.

AZs - according to Amazon, "are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones."

that did not really seem to work.

if you're deployed in one zone and shit hit's the fan: "your fault". if you assume amazon does as advertised and live in several AZ and these go down apparently more or less at the same time: 'amazons fault'...

i read that amazon plans to post a 'postmortem' on this... i'd be really eager to know how AZs are actually designed/sperated. not to be able to point fingers (maybe just a little bit), but to just _know_ where i am deploying stuff to...

Re: Don't blame Amazon for your lack of redundancy

#19

Post by matellis »

fvbock wrote: post #17
cabalamat wrote: post #15

But do blame Amazon for Amazon's lack of redundancy.

i agree. AZs - according to Amazon, "are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones." that did not really seem to work. if you're deployed in one zone and shit hit's the fan: "your fault". if you assume amazon does as advertised and live in several AZ and these go down apparently more or less at the same time: 'amazons fault'... i read that amazon plans to post a…

This is fair comment, especially given that they actually emphasized this multi-AZ redundancy.

The genesis of the article was the press implying that to use the cloud your only choice was to trust AWS provided 100% up-time, and this is a position we disagree with.

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