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AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

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Re: AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

#551
post #487

US-East-1 is more than just a normal region. It also provides the backbone for other services, including those in other regions. Thus simply being in another region doesn’t protect you from the consistent us-east-1 shenanigans. AWS doesn’t talk about that much publicly, but if you press them they will admit in private that there are some pretty nasty single points of failure in the design of AWS that can materialize…

My contention for a long time has been that cloud is full of single points of failure (and nightmarish security hazards) that are just hidden from the customer.

"We can't run things on just a box! That's a single point of failure. We're moving to cloud!"

The difference is that when the cloud goes down you can shift the blame to them, not you, and fixing it is their problem.

The corporate world is full of stuff like this. A huge role of consultants like McKinsey is to provide complicated reports and presentations backing the ideas that the CEO or other board members want to pursue. That way if things don't work out they can blame McKinsey.

Re: AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

#552

Uhm... E(U)ropean sovereigny (and in general spreading the hosting as much as possbile) needed ASAP…

Well, except for a lot of business leaders saying that they don't care if it's Amazon that goes down, because "the rest of the internet will be down too."

Dumb argument imho, but that's how many of them think ime.

Re: AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

#554
post #487

US-East-1 is more than just a normal region. It also provides the backbone for other services, including those in other regions. Thus simply being in another region doesn’t protect you from the consistent us-east-1 shenanigans. AWS doesn’t talk about that much publicly, but if you press them they will admit in private that there are some pretty nasty single points of failure in the design of AWS that can materialize…

Yeah because Amazon engineers are hypocrites. They want you to spend extra money for region failover and multi-az deploys but they don't do it themselves.

They can't even bother to enable billing services in GovCloud regions.

Re: AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

#555
aws had an outage. Many companies were impacted. Headlines around the world blame AWS. the real news is how easy it is to identify companies that have put cost management ahead of service resiliency.

Lots of orgs operating wholly in AWS and sometimes only within us-east-1 had no operational problems last night. Some that is design (not using the impacted services). Some of that is good resiliency in design. And some of that was dumb luck (accidentally good design).

Overall, those companies that had operational problems likely wouldn't have invested in resiliancy expenses in any other deployment strategy either. It could have happened to them in Azure, GCP or even a home rolled datacenter.

Re: AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

#556
post #551
post #487

US-East-1 is more than just a normal region. It also provides the backbone for other services, including those in other regions. Thus simply being in another region doesn’t protect you from the consistent us-east-1 shenanigans. AWS doesn’t talk about that much publicly, but if you press them they will admit in private that there are some pretty nasty single points of failure in the design of AWS that can materialize…

My contention for a long time has been that cloud is full of single points of failure (and nightmarish security hazards) that are just hidden from the customer. "We can't run things on just a box! That's a single point of failure. We're moving to cloud!" The difference is that when the cloud goes down you can shift the blame to them, not you, and fixing it is their problem. The corporate world is full of stuff like t…

You act as if that is a bug not a feature. As hypothetically someone who is responsible for my site staying up, I would much rather blame AWS than myself. Besides none of your customers are going to blame you if every other major site is down.

Re: AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

#558
post #271
post #212

We just had a power outage in Ashburn starting at 10 pm Sunday night. It restored at 3:40am ish, and I know datacenters have redundant power sources but the timing is very suspicious. The AWS outage supposedly started at midnight

Even with redundancy, the response time between NYC and Amazon East in Ashburn is something like 10 ms. The impedance mismatch and dropped packets and increased latency would doom most organizations craplications.

> craplications

LOL

Re: AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

#559
post #436

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…

It's a bit funny that they say "most service operations are succeeding normally now" when, in fact, you cannot yet launch or terminate new EC2 instance, which is basically the defining feature of the cloud...

Is that material to a conversation about service uptime of existing resources, though? Are there customers out there that are churning through the full lifecycle of ephemeral EC2 instances as part of their day-to-day?

Re: AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

#560
post #487

US-East-1 is more than just a normal region. It also provides the backbone for other services, including those in other regions. Thus simply being in another region doesn’t protect you from the consistent us-east-1 shenanigans. AWS doesn’t talk about that much publicly, but if you press them they will admit in private that there are some pretty nasty single points of failure in the design of AWS that can materialize…

Call me crazy, because this is, perhaps it's their "Room 641a". The purpose of a system is what it does, no point arguing 'should' against reality, etc. They've been charging a premium for, and marketing, "Availability" for decades at this point. I worked for a competitor and made a better product: it could endure any of the zones failing.

Interesting. Langley isn’t that far away
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