EC2 Outage Shows How Much the Net Relies On Amazon 147
An anonymous reader writes "Much has been written about the recent EC2/EBS outage, but Keir Thomas at PC World has a different take: it's shown how much cutting-edge Internet infrastructure relies on Amazon, and we should be grateful. Quoting: 'Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy, access to the means of distribution, and rapid evolution.'"
An article at O'Reilly comes to a similarly positive conclusion from a different angle.
Multiple Locations (Score:3, Informative)
Except they didn't work. (Score:5, Informative)
A large number of people that are experiencing this outage, did pay for multiple availability zones, and it didn't help them [networkworld.com].
Re:Except they didn't work. (Score:5, Informative)
I guess what we should learn from this is to put your failover in separate regions, not separate availability zones?
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Do they even have the capability to spread someone out across different regions?
Yes you have full control over what region your instance runs in - some regions cost more than others, the East region is cheaper than the West region.
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Life isn't easy. Non-cloud server backups also aren't easy to do but you'd be called an utter fool for not doing so.
If you're so lazy or incompetent that you can't do what can't be done in a nice pretty GUI with three clicks then you shouldn't be in charge of servers. Cloud or otherwise.
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"Non-cloud server backups also aren't easy to do but you'd be called an utter fool for not doing so."
What are you talking about? It was ungodly simple for me to do, and my backup server sits right here in my living room. My main hosting provider stops responding and my system automatically kicks in to pick up. I may have ten seconds of downtime before my backup starts.
Took less than 20 minutes to setup. But of course, this is why you DO IT YOURSELF instead of relying upon someone else to fuck it up for you.
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I guess what we should learn from this is to put your failover in separate regions, not separate availability zones?
Apparently, data transfer between AZs is cheap or free, while transferring data between regions is effectively transmitting them over the open internet, and counts towards your bandwidth allotment/cost, so it's sometimes prohibitively expensive to failover across regions... it would almost be less expensive to just failover to another hosting provider (which may be even more stable than sticking with Amazon).
This outage was a big black-eye for Amazon, as their recommended way to failover was used, and promp
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Maybe those very smart people should have thought what the difference between an "availability zone" and a region was besides cost, and what that might connote.
It seems like some other very smart people got that right - e.g. Netflix.
While having this outage is a black eye for Amazon, the service tiers seemed to have worked - people who did not pay for regional redundancy did not get it, while people who did were fine.
Now, all of those smart people can ask themselves if ponying up the cash is worth it or if
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The region isn't going to matter if their internal infrastructure manages the clusters (and that's what they are - cloud 'clusters' ) are all 'centrally managed', and that management structure is what failed.
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"I guess what we should learn from this is to put your failover in separate regions, not separate availability zones?"
No, you keep a backup ON SITE.
Christ, even my website has an emergency backup server. While Amazon was fucking everyone else, I was still happily online doing business as usual.
I have said repeatedly that cloud computing wasn't going to be worth a shit. Go ask Reddit how its working out for them right now. Go ask Microsoft about their little fuckup.
Re:Except they didn't work. (Score:5, Informative)
Big companies, that have decided to put crucial operations on Amazon computers are apt to pay up for the equivalent of computing insurance, analysts say. Netflix, the movie rental site, has become a large customer of the Amazon cloud. Most of its Web technology — customer movie queues, search tools and the like — runs in Amazon data centers.
Netflix said it had sailed through the last couple of days unscathed. “That’s because Netflix has taken full advantage of Amazon Web Services’ redundant cloud architecture,” which insures against technical malfunctions in any one location, said Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman.
Sounds like it worked for some.
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It worked just fine I was in the effected zone and just failed over to the west coast region. I actually could have stayed on east coast as our infrastructure does not have single points of failure.
Re:Except they didn't work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Paying for multiple availability zones is not the same as paying for multiple locations. There are multiple availability zones in a single datacenter. Netflix got it right, they spread their infrastructure over multiple physical locations, and didn't suffer any downtime despite losing a significant chunk of their infrastructure; it was business as usual.
Like anything else, cloud computing still requires you to decide how much redundancy you're willing to pay for. If uptime is that important to you, spreading your infrastructure out over multiple datacenters is a no-brainer.
Clouds: Up in the air and foggy: (Score:5, Insightful)
This article seems to be an apology for Amazon.
Basicly it says "We went down, and took down lots of important stuff. That shows just how important we are and that lots of people use us. Thus, our cloud is a good thing."
The logic of that doesn't quite work.
I agree that it's a useful tool, but there are a lot of things that don't make sense to put in the cloud.
Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy: (Score:4, Informative)
I agree that it's a useful tool, but there are a lot of things that don't make sense to put in the cloud.
I always feel better when anything that is mission critical is in-house. Cloud based (and regular internet based) services can become inaccessible for your business if you simply lose your internet connection - it doesn't require all of Amazon to bite the dust.
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I always feel better when anything that is mission critical is in-house. Cloud based (and regular internet based) services can become inaccessible for your business if you simply lose your internet connection - it doesn't require all of Amazon to bite the dust.
But if having your application available to the outside world is mission-critical to the outside world, you're almost always better off colocating it with providers in multiple physical locations.
Even for internal apps that are necessary for your business, you may be better off outsourcing, since if your building catches on fire, you can send employees home to let them continue working. Few companies have the resources to build a truly redundant hosting infrastructure across multiple regions.
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Nice, so colocating means you give your code and data to thieves and governments. Just great doing business with you!
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You are assuming that Amazon does a better job than the OP. Money/size/fame doesn't make something reliable. Not saying that it's necessarily one way or another, but only morons assume things.
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What makes you think the fire suppression systems themselves won't catch fire and thus utterly fail?
The fact that they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars? Go look at some nuclear centrifuges sometime.
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The issue today though isn't in-house vs. colocated, it's cost. Most of these companies don't have the cash to build proper infrastructure to house their services locally. The cloud services from various companies, like Amazon, take care of the physical maintenance and cooling and power, etc.
Even if your local datacenter housed mission-critical data, I'm sure it's possible to come up with 100 scenarios where you could lose all connectivity to your locally-housed infrastructure (power company accidentally d
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Yes, you could architect much easier with cloud platforms to failover in different regions of the world, and Reese is simply plugging his own company's stuff on that one. However, that just makes things more expensive and negates the cost effectiveness of using cloud services in terms of more servers and increased complexity. Will most businesses really need to do that given that they could afford to put their stuff in a single data centre somewher
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You're stuck in a non-vm mentality it seems so I'm not sure why you're talking about things you don't understand.
However, that just makes things more expensive and negates the cost effectiveness of using cloud services in terms of more servers and increased complexity.
How so? Why do you need that many more servers, you're either splitting traffic (so roughly the same number of servers) or simply having enough servers to pick up backups. Now data storage of duplicate backups may add some costs but that's neither servers nor complexity.
And as I said before and you seem to not understand, this is a cloud. If you main servers go down you don't need to have an iden
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My server was down at amazon for maybe 12 hours, that's when I noticed and simply reloaded it from backup in a different working availability zone. Took a few minutes. Had I cared enough to keep backups in a different region then I could have simply reloaded it instantly over there.
How did you architect the data storage for your applications? Is the data kept with the servers? How much data are you working with?
It seems to me that Amazon is decent for the web tier, or any application with a relatively sma
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How did you architect the data storage for your applications? Is the data kept with the servers? How much data are you working with?
Because he hasn't actually done what he says he has. Note that he says he got this running by moving to another availability zone when it was multiple availability zones in one region that were affected.
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You're stuck in a non-vm mentality it seems so I'm not sure why you're talking about things you don't understand.
I do understand it sweetheart because I do it for a fucking living. Give me a break with these Slashdot weenies.
How so? Why do you need that many more servers, you're either splitting traffic (so roughly the same number of servers) or simply having enough servers to pick up backups. Now data storage of duplicate backups may add some costs but that's neither servers nor complexity.
Understanding how EC2 works might be a good start for you. You need to replicate your machine images across different regions as well as incur traffic costs for backup and/or replication depending on how much data you can afford to lose. It's excessive complexity.
And as I said before and you seem to not understand, this is a cloud. If you main servers go down you don't need to have an identical copy of those servers running somewhere else 24/7. You simply create those copies on the fly. They cost you nothing until they're needed and when they are you're not paying for your main servers anyway.
That's because you have no idea what you're talking about and simply don't know the practicalities of what's involved.
You're assuming they can restore from backup, often companies don't want to lose the data since the last backup unless there is no choice. They also need to get a new server, image it, test it and actually put it in the data center. Sure they can automate it all but that, to quote your own words, that negates cost effectiveness.
What does this mea
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Basicly it says "We went down, and took down lots of important stuff. That shows just how important we are and that lots of people use us. Thus, our cloud is a good thing."
That's exactly not what the article said. To summarise, it says, "any server setup has its flaws, but the advantages of Amazon to startups and the democratisation of the web is enough to be thankful for." And I'd agree.
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In comparison to what?
Forget cloud computing! (Score:2)
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I'll stick to my setup of a dedicated server and virtual private servers across the globe rather than putting all my eggs in one basket with Amazon and "cloud computing"! It may be a little bit more in terms of operating costs, but it has true failover in the event of an outage!
Then your app doesn't really need a dynamic cloud.
Some companies have applications that run on a dozen servers during normal times, and need to scale to over a hundred servers during peak peak periods (i.e. a new product launch). With EC2, they can scale automatically and programatically and can spread the virtual servers across multiple regions for additional redundancy. All with a single API.
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With EC2, they can scale automatically and programatically and can spread the virtual servers across multiple regions for additional redundancy. All with a single API.
That sure as fuck didn't seem to be the case these past few days.
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With EC2, they can scale automatically and programatically and can spread the virtual servers across multiple regions for additional redundancy. All with a single API.
That sure as fuck didn't seem to be the case these past few days.
Sure it was - that's why Netflix had no problems, they had instances across more than one region.
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I'll stick to my setup of a dedicated server and virtual private servers across the globe rather than putting all my eggs in one basket with Amazon and "cloud computing"!
I hope that was sarcasm and you really are not that stupid.
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Except it isn't. The OP's sites are still up and working fine, while even many big-name sites (like reddit) are still feeling the impact of this Amazon incident.
"Bailout" of the Cloud now! (Score:3)
Otherwise, Amazon will become too big to fail.
= 9J =
Outages (Score:2, Insightful)
Many .com websites were unnecessarily down for hours since nobody had thought to plan for a outage. I am sure quite a few architecture meetings where held the following day addressing disaster recovery.
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So, in other words, this is exactly what people who use cloud services for mission critical data needed. It's exceptionally hard to learn good lessons from success, but failures are almost guaranteed to teach something. In this case, the community will understand the potential cost of a four-to-six-nines system without a backup. There is always a finite chance of failure.
Still, it was only down for , what - a day? Remember Loma Prieta? WTC collapses? Things happen, and when they do everybody is down for a w
Re:Outages (Score:4, Insightful)
Y'know, call me crazy, but I didn't even notice the outage.
I mean, yeah, I read about it on a number of sites (all still up and runing just fine), but honestly can't say I tried to visit even a single site actually unavailable because of the downtime.
I dunno, perhaps this mostly affected ad hosts and I didn't notice because I already block them?
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Y'know, call me crazy, but I didn't even notice the outage.
I noticed it: Pricewatch was down, and I wanted more memory in my laptop.
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Science can explain religion; not vice versa.
Too bad science can't prove religion, and no, true science can never explain the unexplainable, that's just a dishonest fantasy of pseudoscientists trying to frame all of reality into their own narrow little worldview. It doesn't even matter if some superstitions are true or not or in what degree, because it's just a question of having the courage to keep an open mind about it, that's all. If you do, you could become the next Newton, Einstein, or something great,
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I'm not sure what you're trying to say about my signature. To clarify my position: science can explain what happens in one's brain when one experiences religion. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, tend not to lead to E=MC2 [1]; they're an approximation of logic just like emotions are. Emotions help us to survive, whereas religion helps others to control us (versus spirituality, which is something personal). I'm already something great, and tend not to follow the mainstream (although I still breathe o
SPF (Score:2, Insightful)
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Apparently, because having just one party and no elections makes a democracy. And in later news, why Rupert Murdoch tapping everyone's phones is good for privacy.
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How exactly is this a single point of failure? It's not like there are magically no other ways to put things on the Internet.
And to address my sibling post - this is the purest, most direct form of democracy there is. You vote by using the service, or using some other service, or nothing at all, or many, many other configurations, some of which haven't even been invented yet.
I'm actually rather amazed at the lack of critical thinking skills. I know it's a popular Slashdot meme to say things are going dow
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I know it's a popular Slashdot meme to say things are going downhill, and I am well aware of the curious technophobic streak that runs through a lot of the people here... but to what end?
This has been really bugging me. I started following Slashdot specifically to keep current on trends in IT. Again and again, I see not just recent innovations, but well-established trends derided as unworkable fad ideas. I was already used to the derision of cloud computing when I had an interview at a company that had been doing "software as a service" for over ten years.
Why? My guess is that it has to do with the pattern I've seen of IT grognards who were hired to set up a new system, and remain in place,
Short Memories (Score:1)
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One group taking down WikiLeaks doesn't really matter when it comes to democracy. Indeed, since choice is a part of democracy, one group is perfectly entitled to censor what they like, since one group is utterly insignificant. Indeed, that is how you identify democracies.
The Internet is not democratic and hasn't been since deregulation. The Internet is a federation of dictatorships. You have no choices. If you live in an area where X runs the backbone, ALL ISPs without exception are mere window-dressing ove
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one group is perfectly entitled to censor what they like
They're entitled to, yes, but that doesn't mean that doing so is good for democracy and it certainly doesn't mean we shouldn't scoff and laugh when they're described as "true democracy". Someone needs to be willing to stand up and provide a platform for information that embarrasses the Government; if all the hosting companies and Internet backbone providers and newspapers and publishers and distributors were to refuse to publish it, why, we wouldn't have a democracy anymore at all.
The best way to stop this
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I agree with you in that it isn't good for democracy and that such a platform should be provided. The mere fact that one company could have the power to effectively eliminate all such platforms is, however, proof that what we have is most certainly not democracy than that claims that a single entity can ever constitute democracy are highly suspect at best, propoganda at worst. Far from scoffing, I take it as a dangerous sign that the media (who are ethically obliged to provide accurate, honest information)
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Democracy? (Score:1)
Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy
Eh? And here I thought Amazon was a company trying to make money by selling goods and services.
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And what could be more democratic than selling goods for compensation? Isn't that generally how democracy works? You pay them your vote for them to give you whatever you want. And in modern times, you pay their campaign a lot of money and get to dump your toxic waste wherever you like.
re: "Design for failure" (Score:1)
Well done Amazon - you succeeded in failing
One negative... (Score:3)
When there's a 'service' you'd like to block (such as adverts), amazon hosting can make it rather difficult to consistently block them using an IP blacklist, without also blocking potentially useful things too.
Essentially though, they're just packaging the benefits of an economy of scale - things get cheaper the more you focus on larger supply, and thus they can make the most profits and cut off the most competition by scaling up so much with cheap prices. It's part of how companies from WalMart and Google compete so well.
Economies of scale are also one part of why markets inherently fail over time - competition almost always favors those who scale up best, who can then leverage that power over competitors, preventing them from growing to the same extent, and breaking any meaning to the freedom of the market. At that point, competition becomes defined by who can serve WalMart's interest best.
Ryan Fenton
Where have I heard this before... (Score:5, Insightful)
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One of them is a monopoly in a couple of important areas, and using that monopoly to muscle itself via brute force in nearly every single aspect of computing (gaming, mobile, cloud, etc) - guess which one?
Microsoft can no longer be judged solely on technical grounds (where fortunately they do suck).
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Microsoft: We're sorry our product broke and a lot of people weren't able to get online. Slashdot: BURN THE HERETIC! Amazon: We're sorry our product broke and a lot of people weren't able to get online. Slashdot: It's okay. Here, have a cookie.
Where have I heard this before:
"Our customers depend on our product line, but refuse to pay even more money to upgrade from XP to MS OS de jour" -- Fine, delay the security updates, the more viruses and downtime XP users suffer, the more incentive they'll have to upgrade... Why not move Office to the Cloud?
"Our customers depend on our media and information services, but refuse to pay even more money to access the premium entertainment media since our generic Internet service provides adequate enterta
Made it Through Pretty Much Unscathed (Score:5, Informative)
We had webservers, database (master/slave,) and other services split across usa-east and usa-west.
When usa-east started showing problems, we:
*) Took the usa-east webservers out of round robin DNS (ttl 1hr)
*) Verified the slave (in usa-west) was up to date, shut down the master (usa-east,) and converted the slave to master.
*) Updated all webservers to point to the new master.
*) Cranked up new usa-west webservers / updated round robin DNS
I believe Amazon offers mechanisms to do this automatically or we could just always write our own failover scripts, but this is the tradeoff me made. We were willing to trade some service degradation by switching over manually in exchange for avoiding the pitfalls of false-positive detection. Very much an application specific tradeoff, not for everyone, but it worked for what we are doing.
The key was to avoid putting all eggs in the usa-east basket and splitting up across usa-west, even though we incur additional bandwidth fees, ie master/slave replication transfer is full fee between regions.
We were never concerned about cascading failures effecting multiple availability zones in a give region nor did it matter for us - our redundancy requirement was geographical diversity, not partitions within a datacenter. We were thinking natural disaster, but the architecture covered us in this case as well.
The coolest thing to me is just how quickly we were able to shuffle around these resources to avoid a problem area - a couple of hours. There's no way we could have done it so quickly with what we had before - a combination of our own colocated servers and VPS.
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Nail hit head, you are correct the key to staying running is planning for failure. Anyone that experienced a multi hour outage obviously had not thought things through.
Didn't even notice (Score:2)
There is a whole world out there who didn't even notice Amazon EC2 outage (me included).
Just sayin'.
lesson learnt (Score:2, Insightful)
I was directly affected by this outage. Once i discovered that the issue was at amazon and not at application- i restored from a previous snapshot, synced my application code, and associated my IP to a new instance in a functioning zone.
Total downtime for me was probably just under an hour. And that's including my debugging time.
Overall it wasn't the end of the world for me and i did discover I should make my redundancy setup run more frequently.
Sure i lost a few sales, but in a way i look at this as an
And how much of the net, really ? (Score:3)
i dont know where does this 'how much of the net relies on amazon became clear' bullshit comes from. are there any statistics to show for it ? or, are people unaware of what's going on outside their little world window of expertise, so that they think that amazon cloud, for some reason, has become the 'backbone' of internet ?
really. where are the statistics ? all i see, some random guy gives away some pdf by hosting it through amazon's cloud, and then proceeds to claim that 'net' became too reliant on, amazon
really
It shows a large opportunity it is for Apple (Score:2)
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Let's just see how they expand their cloud services and see if it wants to eat at Amazon's other ventures.
Fanboi much?
Apple has made the decision, fairly quietly, that they are no longer going to sell Xserve server products past Jan 2011.
FAQs for the Xserve End Of Life
Q: Where can I see what Apple has announced about Xserve?
A: The official announcement is here: http://www.apple.com/xserve/resources.html [apple.com]
Guess what? That Apple URL -- gone.
Q: What does this mean for the operating system software, Mac OS X Server? Will there be an upgrade for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion for Xserve?
A: Apple has made no announcement about its plans for Mac OS X Server software.
Q: What are the alternatives sources of hardware?
A: At the time of this post, there are no other suppliers of rack mounted hardware than can run Mac OS X Server.
Q: Can I run OS X Server in a virtual machine on other hardware?
A: At the time of this post, no. The license for OS X Server prohibits installation on hardware from any manufacturer except Apple.
Q: What are the alternatives for an organization dependent on Xserve?
A: You must plan to migrate to another hardware platform, either Apple’s (Mac Pro or Mac Mini) or transition to servers running Windows or Linux.
Maybe you're right, maybe Apple is so bloody cunning that they End of Life'd their server line to ensure that Apple is the only one who can use Apple software / hardware to provide Apple cloud services...
In any event, I won't be buying into their mono-culture with silent death hanging over my head. Giving controll of both the hardware an
I for one welcome our new EC2 Overlord! (Score:2)
Catastrophic failure is good? (Score:1)
Vulnerability in the Cloud (Score:1)
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Because for most companies, a cloud provider can provide better uptime than they can manage by themselves.
All my websites are fine, which is what my high profile clients expect.
I can't imagine why someone would outsource or cloudsource stuff that is this mission critical.
The same company that relies on a single resource zone at EC2 is the same kind of company that will host all of their servers at a single coloc, or worse, host them on-site with a single internet connection and have no backup generator.
Anyone that uses Amazon EC2 to host servers and doesn't have backup servers in a difference availability zone (and region) get what they paid for -- a single point of fa
Re:My cloud is fine (Score:4, Funny)
Re:My cloud is fine (Score:4, Insightful)
All my websites are fine, which is what my high profile clients expect.
That's because we use Microsoft Windows Servers and Sql Databases.
Really? I've found both such products to be unsuitable for the demand we put on such infrastructures - unless I throw a lot more hardware at them. With 1/20th the traffic, and 6% the userbase, our forums crawled on Windows Server and MSSQL Server. We switched to Apache and MySQL, and even running the greatly more database intensive (than the Windows solution we were provided) Simple Machines Forum, we need a lot less hardware than we previously did when we had so much less traffic.
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Eve Online...single shard, single universe... MS SQL server.
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Eve Online...single shard, single universe... MS SQL server.
What AC below said...
This is the persistence layer of EVE Online. There is only one database server running Microsoft SQL Server 2008. This is backed up using online backups to the 'old' TQ DB hardware, a fiber channel RAID array. The current database resides entirely on solid state disk drives, two RAMSAN400 and 2 RAMSAN500 units from Texas Memory Systems. They are not SSD RAID disks, but rather single disk drives capable of high data throughput but crucially fully random requests. On traditional hard d
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Your forums crawl on your current infrastructure, so what's your point?
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All my websites are fine, which is what my high profile clients expect.
That's because we use Microsoft Windows Servers and Sql Databases. Amazon can't take us down.
I can't imagine why someone would outsource or cloudsource stuff that is this mission critical.
Either you're at an organization that has multiple geographically-distributed datacenters and you've replicated everything so that losing any single datacenter will not cripple things (difficult, but should be possible with any OS exposed to the application level) or you're critically vulnerable to the Backhoe Effect. If someone drills through the only fiber to your servers, they will be taken offline from your client's perspective. (Power is often an issue too, as it takes a lot of electrical energy to run
Why The Cloud? (Score:2)
Why is so much in the cloud? I've heard it touted in lots of marketing speak, but I've never worked with it.
As someone who has never worked with the cloud (shocking, I know), what are the advantages and disadvantages?
Is it basically just distributed scalable redundant web hosting run by a big company? So you're basically renting to avoid the start-up capital costs of those services and to put them in the hands of specialists, while you focus on your web apps?
Or is it more?
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I really don't get the slashdots hate against cloud providers, but I guess it's mostly just people who haven't even used such or worked with them and compared them to other solutions. The same old elitist "this new shit is useless, I like my old ways thank
Re:Why The Cloud? (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm, considering how long "the cloud" has been a buzzword, doesn't it seem like an awful lot of unscheduled downtime if there have been enough events already for people to be claiming that they aren't given a fair shake by the media when they go down. After all, if the media have reported on it several times, it's happened several times. That's more unscheduled downtime than your typical web server gets in a few years.
Perhaps if they hadn't gone with a word that means fuzzy, insubstantial and ephemeral to describe their services people wouldn't have the same reservations about it. Maybe it's also because IT people don't like their managers to say "I just heard about this neat new thing, let's abandon the system we have now to pursue this" against their advice, then have to deal with being screamed at by their managers later when everything is down and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it because they've effectively ceded all control to a third party service provider who has not managed, thus far, to establish themselves as particularly safe or reliable.
The apologists whose articles are linked in this Slashdot story seem to think it's great that we're putting all of our eggs into the baskets of known basket droppers. Thus far I'm not impressed enough by these providers. Obviously, in order to do anything on the Internet, you have to rely on some sort of service provider, and even they have to rely on their peers. So obviously there's no way you can have total control. Nevertheless, you should still try to retain all the control you can over your own stuff.
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If you're being stupid and taking shortcuts thinking you won't need that, well, it's your choice. You would do it with any kind of service anyway.
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[...] I really don't get the slashdots hate against cloud providers, but I guess it's mostly just people who haven't even used such or worked with them and compared them to other solutions. [...]
The Cloud is like Flash, JavaScript and many other technologies: It has its uses, but too many people mistake or abuse it for something that it is not. Too much stuff is put into "the Cloud" just so it is there, often at the expense of stability, usefulness and data protection. It has become one of those buzzwords non-technical management loves to slap on their company's website to appear modern, akin to the stupid $genericproduct 2.0 before it, and the $genericproduct 2000 before that, and the $genericprod
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If you do the math for full utilization of an EC2 instance, or any other cloud offering, you'll see you're paying about 10x what the same would cost with a dedicated VPS or managed host. You only pay for what you use, but their definition of utilization is designed to make it hard to estimate how much you actually will use (do you usually keep track of the quantity of GET and POST requests, as well as the bandwidth, for things you build?)
My problem with the cloud is much like my problem with health care ref
Slightly more... but yeah (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess that the major difference to traditional outsourced hosting is what you mentioned but didn't emphasis... The "scalable" part. If you normally spend X amount of resources (CPU time, memory, whatever) and might get a peak of 50X resources at some point, traditionally you would either constantly pay for a lot of resources that you didn't need for most of the time, or your service would crash during the peak. Cloud offers a lot more flexibility as you can pay based on what you use, not based on what you
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I'll give you an example of what some may consider "cloud computing". Say you purchase a franchise. The franchiser, as part of the deal, requires that you use their software for all accounting, dispatching techs, if applicable, reporting, maintaining your customer list etc. A few of my clients have been in this scenario. Here are the drawbacks:
1. Obvious case, servers not available. In a service industry, such as air conditioning companies etc, this mean you don't even know where your techs are suppos
Re:Why The Cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
The cloud represents a black box that abstracts the underlying network topology.
You might send your data to a server in Germany and retrieve it from a server in the USA. When you put something in the cloud you do not have to worry about problems like this because the cloud provider already has a hot backup ready to take the slack in another part of the world. You don't need to know or care how it happens, it just works. S3 is an Amazon example of a cloud service. You send your file to S3 and Amazon takes the responsibility of ensuring that it is available even if a datacenter is blown to smithereens.
EC2 and EBS are not the cloud. There is no abstraction of the datacenter. Amazon leaves it up to you to choose which datacenter you wish to work in. This can allow you to easily build a cloud application on top of their physical infrastructure, but it is up to you to make it "the cloud". We witnessed so many failures because the applications were not cloud applications, just standard hosted services.
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Is it basically just distributed scalable redundant web hosting run by a big company? So you're basically renting to avoid the start-up capital costs of those services and to put them in the hands of specialists, while you focus on your web apps?
More or less. You can rent all kinds of stuff these days. But the idea remains the same: put the stuff that isn't your core competency into the hands of somebody who has that as their core competency, and focus on what you do best. It's basically the theory of comparative advantage put to a real world challenge, and it's working. Yes, occasionally things like an EC2 outage happen. But you don't hear the millions of times a corporate server failed and took down their own apps.
What it boils down to is trust:
Re:Why The Cloud? (Score:5, Informative)
Why is so much in the cloud? I've heard it touted in lots of marketing speak, but I've never worked with it.
As someone who has never worked with the cloud (shocking, I know), what are the advantages and disadvantages?
Is it basically just distributed scalable redundant web hosting run by a big company? So you're basically renting to avoid the start-up capital costs of those services and to put them in the hands of specialists, while you focus on your web apps?
Or is it more?
There's a big mix-up of lots of different concepts and ideas here, to the point that the questions you ask are impossible to answer.
- EC2 is a vps-like virtual server provisioning service. You rent a virtual server instance by the hour. APIs exist for you to dynamically add and remove instances as needed. You create an image, then can fire up additional instances as you see fit. Someone like Netflix for instance, can fire up streaming servers during peak hours then shut them down at off hours.
- You can of course set up your own co-lo systems, but it will be provisioned 24/7 and will cost you more since it will be sized for peak capacity, and even during peak most of the servers will be idle much of the time due to random load variance. You can improve peak utilization by setting up your own virtual provisioning. But then you have ops costs, so unless you have a massive operational scale you'll find it cheaper to buy from AWS (or linode, rackspace, etc).
- EBS is a logical volume service. You create a volume and mount it on an EC2 instance. Like with server instances, there are API calls to dynamically create EBS volumes. You can unmount it and move it to a different server in the same datacenter, so you could use them for instance to take backup snapshots or log analysis, or similar, in addition to simply being server storage. Of course you get to build or buy the software to do all these things yourself.
- Server instances belong to groups, and have access controls set up among them. This allows you to create private 'backplane' interconnects, where some things like sql servers are only accessible to instances part of a group.
- EIPs are elastic IPs, which are IPs you lease and can then assign to any of your server instances (usually ingress and point-of-contact servers). You can move them between virtual servers as you like, and obviously would typically map DNS to them. Servers will otherwise get anonymous IP addresses, meaning they get something arbitrarily assigned. They're reachable (if you wish) from the net at large, but aren't well-known points for your service.
- AWS also provides a load distribution service. I've never used this actually; it never seemed to fit right.
- S3 is a cloud service, meaning it has no deterministic ingress and egress. It's used for content distribution: writing is expensive, reading is dirt cheap. Content stored is automatically replicated and de-replicated as needed. You have no idea where it lives, in how many copies, and how it's backed up. SLAs make promises about availability.
- Content distribution is a poster child cloud service example. Not all services will easily fit a cloud model. Many other services that have fit the model (mainly using mapreduce or like) are batch processing based and more about massaging massive amounts of data than interactive end-user services.
- Somewhat simplified, if your service can fit around a key-value store (even a sophisticated one like MongoDB), then it's a candidate for a cloud architecture.
- There are plenty of providers of bits and pieces to do things like server monitoring, cost analysis, and automated/manual server provisioning. In fact, I'm getting into this business myself...
A 'cloud' service is not a hosting service - it's a way to build things, a black-box mindset. There may be a well-defined point of contact (perhaps found via DNS), but beyond that everything is dynamic. The initial contact can redirect, either explicitly or implicitly. It's not like a 'hosting' service where you click a button and get a Joomla host. But it might be a viable way to implement such a hosting service.
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Clouds aren't the problem. It's contracting your cloud out to a third party that's the problem.
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Exactly. What I'd like to see is an open cloud platform that makes it easy to distribute nodes between multiple unrelated ISPs instead of all the servers being handled by a single monolithic entity such as Amazon or Google.
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>What I'd like to see is an open cloud platform
http://www.openstack.org/ [openstack.org]
You've got Rackspace + Softlayer and about 60 other companies [openstack.org].
Re:It also shows... (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy, access to the means of distribution, and rapid evolution
Spirit of the internet? Some on seeing Amazons' passing judgement on Wikileaks might think it more aligned with a certain corporate spirit than a spirit of the internet. If they're really support democracy, which can't function properly with a poorly informed public, maybe they shouldn't be the ones to decide whether or not someone is a journalist.
Hardware doesn't make spirit. What people are doing, and the thoughts that drive the choices made probably do.
They are still contented to profit from the sale of books about WikiLeaks.
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-WikiLeaks-Assange-Dangerous-Website/dp/030795191X [amazon.com]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/dec/11/wikileaks-amazon-denial-democracy-lieberman [guardian.co.uk]
Re:It also shows... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Seeing how the internet is the cloud where else do you expect internet sites to go?
No, if you throw a packet into the "cloud" known as the Internet, it usually comes out where you wanted it to go, and you don't need to know the path it took to get there. "Cloud computing" is an entirely different concept (or, rather, a set of somewhat related concepts that mean different things to different people.) The Internet just schleps data from here to there.
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Using what is supposed to be a kind of utility, a cloud service, does not qualify as "trying to hide behind", or else that applies to everyone else who uses it, nor does it mean that Amazon was involved in the mess any more than a phone company is, when they carry whatever communications, nor does it mean that it puts any of Amazon's customers at risk. An army of straw men will not make a point more valid. On the contrary, it is an implied threat against any of Amazon's customers, that if they are not po