AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

Since I'm 5+ years out from my NDA around this stuff, I'll give some high level details here.

Snapchat heavily used Google AppEngine to scale. This was basically a magical Java runtime that would 'hot path split' the monolithic service into lambda-like worker pools. Pretty crazy, but it worked well.

Snapchat leaned very heavily on this though and basically let Google build the tech that allowed them to scale up instead of dealing with that problem internally. At one point, Snap was >70% of all GCP usage. And this was almost all concentrated on ONE Java service. Nuts stuff.

Anyway, eventually Google was no longer happy with supporting this and the corporate way of breaking up is "hey we're gonna charge you 10x what did last year for this, kay?" (I don't know if it was actually 10x. It was just a LOT more)

So began the migration towards Kubernetes and AWS EKS. Snap was one of the pilot customers for EKS before it was generally available, iirc. (I helped work on this migration in 2018/2019)

Now, 6+ years later, I don't think Snap heavily uses GCP for traffic unless they migrated back. And this outage basically confirms that :P

Dumb question but what's the difference between the two? If the underlying config is broken then DNS resolution would fail, and that's basically the only way resolution fails, no?

Most companies just aren't important enough to worry about "AWS never come back up." Planning for this case is just like planning for a terrorist blowing up your entire office. If you're the Pentagon sure you'd better have a plan for that. But most companies are not the Pentagon.

We created a single point of failure on the Internet, so that companies could avoid single points of failure in their data centers.

Looks like they’re nearly done fixing it.

> Oct 20 3:35 AM PDT

> The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now. Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution. Additionally, some services are continuing to work through a backlog of events such as Cloudtrail and Lambda. While most operations are recovered, requests to launch new EC2 instances (or services that launch EC2 instances such as ECS) in the US-EAST-1 Region are still experiencing increased error rates. We continue to work toward full resolution. If you are still experiencing an issue resolving the DynamoDB service endpoints in US-EAST-1, we recommend flushing your DNS caches. We will provide an update by 4:15 AM, or sooner if we have additional information to share.