Amazon EBS Failure Brings Down Reddit, Imgur, Others 176
Several readers have sent word of a significant Amazon EBS outage. Quoting:
"Amazon Web Services has confirmed that its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service is experiencing degraded service, leading sites across the Internet to experience downtime, including Reddit, Imgur and many others. AWS confirmed on its status page at 2:11 p.m. ET that it is experiencing 'degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes.' It says the issue is restricted to a single Availability Zone within the US-East-1 Region, which is in Northern Virginia. AWS later reported that its Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and its Elastic Beanstalk application plaform also experienced failures on Monday afternoon."
I hope this doesn't affect Facebook. (Score:2, Funny)
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Nope, FB is alive and well.
To be fair, I find a lot more entertainment in Reddit and Imgur than FB...
Re:I hope this doesn't affect Facebook. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm just glad I moved my hosting away from AWS. It seems they've had a few problems lately in their datacentres. Local Aussie hosting seems to have better bandwidth anyway.
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Local Aussie hosting is easily double the cost though. I have servers with Crucial Paradigm Australia and Crucial Paradigm USA. The websites appear just as fast to the average user but the USA hosting is 1/3rd the price.
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If you primarily serve Australia then a local host is fine. If you serve an international audience that host is going to have poor latency for a majority of your visitors.
AWS is an option. You could also use an edge caching service like Akamai. Akamai is likely much more expensive than AWS.
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Productivity up (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Productivity up (Score:5, Funny)
Should we expect a baby boom in nine months?
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More blind and hairy hand people, probably.
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With imgur down, don't you mean less blind and hairy people?
Re:Productivity up (Score:5, Funny)
Not from reddit users (or slashdotters for that matter).
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But But But (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the cloud! It's like never like down, and webscale!
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dod
I'm afraid your typo is indefensible.
Interestingly enough... (Score:5, Funny)
Since no one can go on reddit, they will come back to /. only to find out why reddit is down!
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Confirmed.
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Hey, confirming is Netcraft's job!
Re:Interestingly enough... (Score:4, Informative)
All of those things were done here before they were done at reddit. You might want to get a new prescription for your rose colored glasses.
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And it worked, too.
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Other Victims (Score:5, Informative)
define "leading" ... (Score:5, Funny)
/. is working just fine.
Are those karma points in the mail?
Oblig (Score:5, Funny)
It's as if millions of geek voices cried out in terror & were suddenly silenced.
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If a geek cries out in terror and there's not site to read it on, do they really cry out in terror?
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How about: andnothingofvaluewaslost?
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Holy shit, when did memes get banned from the internet?
Re:Oblig (Score:4, Funny)
Holy shit, when did memes get banned from the internet?
reddit is down, he is expecting to see nothing but NEW shitty in-jokes and hasty photoshops as he takes refuge from the storm... your attempt to re-use old humor would normally earn you a downvote but he cant find the thumb buttons on this jalopy of a website.
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I think Natalie Portman and the Hot Grits had something to do with it...
Holy shit, when did memes get banned from the internet?
Single AZ my butt (Score:3, Informative)
We are seeing EBS problems across multiple AZs with our services, as are many others. Amazon is downplaying the issue.
See HN for ongoing discussion as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/
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Yeah, I'm in southern Indiana and Reddit has been down all day.
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Like when you ask for Tea and the waitress doesn't know if you mean southerner Sweet Tea or northerner style Unsweetened Tea?
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Here in the South, if you just ask for "tea" you will get horribly over sweetened iced tea. You can ask for "unsweet" tea or hot tea. Hot tea is served unsweetened. If self serve dispensers are available it is common for those of reasonable taste to use sweet tea to sweeten their unsweet tea. Don't ask for it mixed though, counter monkeys don't do complicated.
Same region as the storm in June (Score:5, Informative)
Bad luck if you're hosted in the US-East-1 Region [amazon.com], I guess.
Heh, I should really start advertising the LVS clusters I tend to as 'private clouds with better uptime than Amazon'.
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According to amazon, it's not an outage, it's a "performance disruption". My guess is, this will negate costly concessions based on SLA's.
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Unless they have performance SLAs as well as uptime SLAs. Which they really should. Who the hell would move their system/site to a server hosting business without a performance SLA? I mean, you wanted 23 second page load times on your site, right?
Re:Same region as the storm in June (Score:4, Informative)
Desk phones and SIP clients out for 2.5 hours for me. Calls rolled over at the provider level like they were supposed to though. Didn't think I'd have to put that to the test so soon.
The server qualifies for the free tier, and that's probably why it just went straight unresponsive for two hours. Maybe I should upgrade to a slightly larger paid/reserved instance and..... Wait, I smell conspiracy.
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The server qualifies for the free tier, and that's probably why it just went straight unresponsive for two hours. Maybe I should upgrade to a slightly larger paid/reserved instance and..... Wait, I smell conspiracy.
I'm right now hacking away at an EC2 instance with an EBS volume in the affected region, with no disruptions. The EC2 is an "Extra Large Instance" (need it for the IOPS more than the CPU or memory), though I don't think that matters so far as EBS is concerned.
Low Availability? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Low Availability? (Score:4, Informative)
>Reddit, Imgur, etc., don't have presences in multiple availability zones to prevent this kind of outage
They do. It's a multi-AZ outage, despite what Amazon is saying.
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yeah my ec2 instance that is hosted in east-1a is up and the management console tells me it's just east-1d that is down...but i have a hard time believing that
Re:Low Availability? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Low Availability? (Score:5, Interesting)
They do. It's a multi-AZ outage, despite what Amazon is saying.
Amazon's multiple availability zones stuff is total bullshit. It has become painfully apparent during every single one of these outages that the so-called availability zones are not separate because an EBS problem propagates everywhere. No one can actually work the availability zones out either because what Amazon cunningly does is call zones by different letters for different customers, so availability zone 'a' for one might be availability zone 'c' for another so no one can actually compare. That fact alone sent my bullshit meter off the scale. It just seems excessively evasive and sneaky for my taste.
If you want redundancy you are going to have to go to completely geographically separate zones. Keeping those zones in sync is prohibitively expensive for the vast majority. Either that or you have a backup cloud provider, but again you have to be so paranoid and trust Amazon so little that you have to be able to have your data out and off Amazon's infrastructure at least nightly at a moment's notice. Sorry, but that just doesn't work.
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Re:Low Availability? (Score:4, Informative)
Multi AZ IS "completely geographically separate zones" and yes, you can specifically define which ones.
Amazon is very clear that US East 1a,b,c,d are all the same physical data center. However, West is not. It's in Oregon (as opposed to VA for East)
I've seen no evidence that true Multi AZ instances (as described by Amazon) are down. If you've got some though, I would be interested to see it because I would be pretty concerned.
Availability Zones are not geographically separate - regions are:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#features [amazon.com]
Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location. Regions consist of one or more Availability Zones, are geographically dispersed, and will be in separate geographic areas or countries
Re:Low Availability? (Score:5, Interesting)
Multi AZ IS "completely geographically separate zones" and yes...
Availability zones are not geographically separate nor is there any evidence that they are geographically or even logically separate from the nature of every major EBS outage there has been.
Amazon is very clear that US East 1a,b,c,d are all the same physical data center. However, West is not. It's in Oregon (as opposed to VA for East)
a, b, c and d are availability zones. US East, West etc. are different regions. I'm afraid you're not understanding just what is meant by availability zones or just muddying the waters.
I've seen no evidence that true Multi AZ instances (as described by Amazon) are down. If you've got some though, I would be interested to see it because I would be pretty concerned.
As I've said above, Amazon makes it as difficult as possible to verify availability zone failures because AZ 'a' for one customer might be 'c' for another and 'b' for another, so you can't verify anything with others. However, it becomes very clear when you get on Amazon's forums and look at major sites that have implemented in multiple zones from their perspective that they are down and have EBS problems in different zones they have. You don't get much more evidence than that.
If you're not concerned when looking at that then I smell some apologism I'm afraid.
Re:Low Availability? (Score:5, Funny)
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Caution: Magic Cloud may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
Do not taunt Magic Cloud.
Warning: Failure to believe in Magic Cloud may result in a targeted nuclear strike in your availability zone.
Magic Cloud should not be used if you are feeling angry.
Never ask Magic Cloud to play a game.
Magic Cloud: satisfaction guaranteed!*
(*) Except for satisfaction-free areas. Please consult your Service Level Agreement for more information.
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You forgot one:
Magic cloud has Super Cow Powers (if you believe in it).
Re:Low Availability? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems to me that the answer is just to host things yourself, instead of relying on another company's infrastructure.
How do you host anything without relying on another company's infrastructure? Do you purchase right-of-way's between your site and all of your customers and string your own fiber? Do you run your own power plant? Do you build your own UPS, right down to the batteries so you don't need to trust a UPS vendor? Do you build and service your own CRAC's?
It's impossible for any company to *not* rely on another company's infrastructure even if just for internet connectivity, the only question is where to draw the line - do you really want to rack and stack your own servers? Do you trust a vendor to do periodic preventative maintenance on your generators, or do you use your own staff? Do you certify your own staff to service your fire suppression system, or do you contract out to a vendor? Do you want to own your own network equipment and do your own network admin? Do you want to swap out servers and disk drives when they fail? Do you keep staff electricians on-hand to take care of electrical issues? Do you want to run a 24x7 NOC to monitor and maintain your datacenter?
While a large company may be able to keep many of these tasks in-house, many small companies can't afford the staff it would take to control all of their infrastructure.
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No, most companies can't take full control of their infrastructure. But, they can diversify across two providers, and try to ensure that there is no major work in common change control windows. In a perfect world, you would have hosted services that support 100% of your peak needs, plus a hot disaster recovery site in your own facility that can handle your full average load.
Unfortunately, I am sure that there is some sorry company out there that says "Let's PM all of our generators at the same time this w
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It's a multi-AZ outage, despite what Amazon is saying.
And/or AZ's aren't quite as physically isolated as Amazon makes out, which I've suspected for a while.
Re:Low Availability? (Score:5, Interesting)
We're experiencing our own outages at work, unrelated to AWS, but I'd hate to be an AWS admin during one of these major outages.
I used to be an admin working on AWS through some of these outages, and it's not pleasant let me tell you. The amount of redundancy you need to get through this makes putting stuff in the cloud prohibitively expensive and things are basically out of your hands. When you run your own servers you know how long it will take to replace a piece of hardware or take emergency measures to keep things running. At least you know you have control over the process. Amazon? They recover what they can of your EBS disks in a few days without telling you anything and in the case of the European outage they actually screwed the EBS snapshots with a recovery job they ran. Thankfully I ran backups every night that took all data off Amazon's system. All I didn't know was when I could be back up and running.
Using AWS for throwaway computing where you just want some computing power for a few weeks of the year? Yes, fine. Permanently running stuff in it? Nope.
Re:Low Availability? (Score:5, Interesting)
....and in the case of the European outage they actually screwed the EBS snapshots with a recovery job they ran. Thankfully I ran backups every night that took all data off Amazon's system. All I didn't know was when I could be back up and running.
I felt this was worth emphasising. These are EBS snapshots, not just the EBS disks - the ones supposedly stored in S3 and immune to corruption. Your backups, in other words. If you use RDS you rely on these completely for backup.
AWS is OK to get yourself up and running without paying huge amounts up front for hardware, but be aware that you just simply cannot trust this infrastructure.
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Bright and Sunny Skies Today! (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you still think that putting your digital life in the "cloud", without any ability to fall back on a physical hard drive or device, is a good idea?
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Because physical servers don't ever fail?
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No but you can make them reliable if needed.
In the cloud you're at the mercy of the beancounters at Amazon & co.
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As much as I, like most people here grin with a certain kind of glee* when something this big goes down, the fact is that doing it yourself is nearly always less reliable.
Also, there's nothing necessarily exclusive about the cloud - you can back up your data too, right?
*Yes, it's evil - but it's because I've had the adrenaline in the past and know what it is like - despite it being one of the worst times, it can also be one of the best for loads of people.
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Of course you can also have a local server/datacenter that can run your same VM image, and use it
Re:Bright and Sunny Skies Today! (Score:5, Interesting)
My first thoughts as well.
A friend was recently telling me about an issue they were having at work ... they host stuff for other people, and have very high-availability SLAs. Unfortunately, the support they have from some of their own internal people is "weekdays 9-5". So when an outage happened, they were dead in the water, because their own people basically said "sorry, we don't do after hours support".
Your SLA is only as good as your weakest link. Granted, some of these sites may not have SLAs, but if you have an external vendor providing some of this stuff, and their service levels suck, then your service level can't be any better.
For me, I can't see why companies would be willing to do this kind of thing. The risks are just too high.
Re:Bright and Sunny Skies Today! (Score:5, Funny)
For me, I can't see why companies would be willing to do this kind of thing. The risks are just too high.
That's because you don't have an MBA.
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So when an outage happened, they were dead in the water, because their own people basically said "sorry, we don't do after hours support".
This is not a system failure, it's a Human Resources failure.
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No, it is more of a salesman failure, or a side effect of working in a large company.
People sell outsourcing services, and they use products that other divisions of the company make and support.
If something goes wrong, one division is on the hook for a high service level, and the other division provides the same level of crappy support they provide their customers.
The group on the hook for the service has no clout over the group that makes the product in use.
I have seen software sales where the salesman bun
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Your SLA is only as good as your weakest link.
It seems like Amazon's weakest link is Virginia. /. that Virginia seems to be the epicenter for epic fail.
I recall from the last Amazon outage thread on
Re:Bright and Sunny Skies Today! (Score:5, Insightful)
Your SLA is only as good as your weakest link. Granted, some of these sites may not have SLAs, but if you have an external vendor providing some of this stuff, and their service levels suck, then your service level can't be any better.
For me, I can't see why companies would be willing to do this kind of thing. The risks are just too high.
Because many companies are not willing to spend what it takes to get availability greater than what they can get at Amazon - especially if they take advantage of multi-AZ or multi-region redundancy.
Sure, having a physical server at the office that you know you can fix by buying parts at the local computer store sounds attractive. Until the day you find that your building has burnt to the ground. Or a truck knocked over the utility pole providing network and electricity to your building. Or you discover that when you looked at the flood maps to make sure you weren't in a flood zone, the maps didn't account for a water main breaking and flooding the basement where your telecom equipment is... or the clogged roof drains that let 20,000 gallons of water to build up on the roof during a rainstorm until the roof collapsed and flooded your datacenter. Or the earthquake (or hurricane or tornado or flood or whatever) that takes down your site for days or weeks or even months, and your employees are more concerned with surviving than trying to get your critical systems back online.
Meeting an SLA for your own facility only works when that facility is running, and often the company that rents office space has little control over the facility.
My company has a number critical services running in one Amazon region with replication to a second region for failover. The second region costs very little, just a single instance to hold data replicated from the primary instance, then if we need to spin up the servers in the secondary region, it takes about 10 minutes to push the data from the local copy to the other servers once we start them up.
We could automate the whole process, but Amazon problems are rare enough that it hasn't been worth it.
We do have a couple servers in us-east-1a but so far those servers appear to be fine, although the AWS management interface has not been working for managing servers in that region/AZ. If we ran servers out of our local office instead of Amazon, we would have had at least 2 instances of complete downtime in the past year - one 3 hour internet outage, and a 48 hour power failure on a weekend when a transformer blew and the power company didn't have an available spare and had to truck it in from out of area.
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You're talking like hosting your own servers on premises or being in the cloud are your only choices. You could also rent space in a high quality data center and replicate you data out to another high quality datacenter where you also rent space in a different geographic location. Then, when your primary data center goes down, you switch over to the other one. Or run off both at the same time if your architecture allows you do do that. That basically covers you in most instances. If both your rented datacenters go out at the same time, and they are in different locations, there's probably much bigger things to worry about. Or you didn't pick very good datacenters in the first place.
Isn't that the same as putting your servers into multiple Amazon regions? You're still putting your destiny in your hands of the datacenter.
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Fundamentally it is different because modes of common failure are much less severe. If Amazon takes a hit to one facility, it is going to load up other facilities.
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If one AWS AZ goes down I can bring up servers in a second one. If one AWS region goes down I can bring up servers in a second one. In fact to hedge against these risks I *already have* servers in multiple zones and regions.
Sure you can do that with traditional data centers. Just host your stuff across more than one, right? Do you have any concept of what that COSTS? Espe
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If the management API and web interface go down throughout the entireity of AWS, as they did in this outage according to some users, good luck bringing up another server. Besides, everyone else had the same idea - if one region goes down, we can just bring up a server in another region, so we don't have to pay for servers in multiple data centers - so it turned out there weren't actually nearly enough servers available for them to do this.
I don't... (Score:2)
My life and business doesn't rely on ANY internet based social service things and I make sure my customers are not dependent on social media to know whats going on with my business. Hell even if the internet would go down I still have a phone book and a land line.
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Hell even if the internet would go down I still have a phone book and a land line.
Hey, me too! It's always good to have things lying around to club people with when civilization ends.
multi AZ? (Score:3, Interesting)
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An honest question, why don't these large, big-name sites utilize the Multi Availability Zone failover that Amazon offers?
They do. Plenty of people do. The problem is that these EBS failures always propagate across availability zones no matter what Amazon says.
If they WERE using Multi AZ, or there is some other technical reason why it wouldn't help, I'm really curious to know why...
Because you have no hard experience of what multiple availability zones practically means in Amazon's infrastructure.
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Multi-AZ is only available for certain services. It's slower and costs twice as much. There's also replication delay issues between multi-AZ instances.
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Re:multi AZ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you have any evidence of this? Because I haven't seen any. And it sounds tin-foil-hat.
Sites who implement multiple across multiple zones are down and the forums are full of customers who complain about EBS slowdowns and problems regardless of the availability zones they personally use. You're an apologist if you haven't grokked this yet.
Actually, I run a load-balanced, redundant site on AWS. I ask the question because Multi-AZ (as defined by AWS) means geographically different...
This is total rubbish. Availability zones are not geographically separate, and don't give me that 'as defined by AWS' crap to give yourself a back door (they don't, anyway). Expanding to multiple regions which is the only thing you can do is not the same thing.
as in US West (in Oregon) vs US East (in Virginia) - NOT just the difference between US-East-1a,b,c,d (which Amazon makes very clear are in the same data center). That's why it's odd that Virginia's issues would affect Oregon (or any of the other AZs)
No, Amazon is very, very clear on what an availability zone actually is. Stop trying to make AZs out to be separate regions to get yourself out of this. They are not.
Try being helpful next time and answering the genuine question instead of smarting off because you can't get on reddit.
I'm afraid you don't run any geographically separate system that spans multiple regions because it is prohibitively expensive to do so. You don't maintain AMIs and backups in different regions and you don't pay for the extremely large amount of bandwidth you need to keep those regions mirrored and synchronised.
Sorry, but you aren't doing what you say you're doing and you don't know what the difference between availability zones and regions actually are, which was central to the question you asked. You were called out on it.
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An honest question, why don't these large, big-name sites utilize the Multi Availability Zone failover that Amazon offers?
It seems these AWS outages make for good headlines, but shouldn't any large site be co-located in multiple physical locations to ensure uptime?
If they WERE using Multi AZ, or there is some other technical reason why it wouldn't help, I'm really curious to know why...
There are rumors floating around that this affects more than one AZ - I'd never host critical infrastructure entirely in a single region even across multiple AZ's - much better to have it spread across multiple regions would eliminate most failure modes that could affect one region (like an East Coast Hurricane).
Re:multi AZ? (Score:4, Informative)
If they WERE using Multi AZ, or there is some other technical reason why it wouldn't help, I'm really curious to know why...
Here's your answer: cascading failures [wikipedia.org].
In short, the cascading failures don't happen because one local failure cause the entire capacity of the network to be exceeded... you see, it is not a case of every node connected to every node (O(N^2) connections), thus a failure only need to overload the capacity of the nodes connected to the failing one...
But the cloud is so much better to use! (Score:2)
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Well, no. They likely could do lots of other things -- they probably will choose not to do much else if Amazon doesn't take a ludicrously long time to fix the problem because that's easier than the other things they can do, and if they can't do anything else its not because they used the cloud, but because they both used didn't do contingency planning that enabled them to addr
As Usual... (Score:3, Funny)
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Nah, xkcd is down too.
other sites down (Score:1)
To the dudes working at AWS (Score:2)
No Fancy Uptime Numbers for them (Score:3)
Re:No Fancy Uptime Numbers for them (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, look everybody, the cloud is still up! You can't do near as much as you usually can, but it's up! 100% uptime! Woo!
Amazon is dead (Score:2)
Netcraft confirms it.
wow, mainframe problems in the cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
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If only there were some lessons learned over decades and decades of mainframe use that that could be applied to the cloud.
Fans of, "I don't want to have to do my job" will never learn the lessons of the past.
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Yeah - it's like availability and uptime is getting worse, rather than better.
What do you mean, it's not...
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habit forming (Score:2)
This zapping people's data is getting to be habit forming for Amazon I think.
I guess we're just waiting to hear if it was a mistake or on purpose.
Minecraft login is down too! (Score:2)
I sense a new game (Score:2)
In a virtual world, you put on your roller blades, and administer a failing data center. Level 1 is your home LAN. Level 2 is a law office and all the attorneys want the morning's court briefs immediately because court starts in 45 minutes and the file server screen says "RAID array offline". Level 3 is a small ISP. Level 4 is AWS. Level 5 is Google. Good luck!
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Some major websites go down.... the internet has stayed rock solid throughout this.
Those major websites will be back up in a few hours.
You expect the internet to be infallible? Not going to happen.