

Working around the EC2 outage - jpetazzo
http://blog.dotcloud.com/working-around-the-ec2-outage

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ulope
Having read that (and assuming it's accurate) I really wonder how anyone in
their right mind can see EC2 as a viable hosting solution.

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pan69
EC2 is built for scalability and distributed systems. The article seems to
give a negative spin on something which is the authors own fault.

In most traditional hosting environments you have e.g. one web server. If this
one server goes down your website stops working. A solution would be to have
two web servers behind a load balancer. If one web server goes down, the other
takes over and your site continues to work.

A lot of people who are hosting on EC2 place all their application components
in the Virginia data-centers (because its the cheapest data center for reasons
the article points out). If the Virginia data center is down nothing works any
more. However, EC2 gives you the option to distribute your website over
multiple data centers in case of an event like this.

If you choose not to take advantage of this architecture you're no different
than running your website on a single web server. E.g. a single point of
failure. With EC2 you have to ability to set up a website that never goes
down.

Of course, distributing your web site over multiple data centers can be
costly. But I guess it's pick and choose, not bitch and moan.

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ulope
Well ok that's understood. But still - instances randomly crashing is not
acceptable under any circumstances in my view.

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shykes
Just to be clear. DotCloud is in fact designed to withstand instances randomly
crashing.

So far however, it has not been designed for instances randomly crashing
_across multiple datacenters_. I will add that neither is the canonical high-
availability designed _recommended by Amazon_.

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mbailey
Quick answer: have presence in both the VA and CA locations.

~~~
shykes
The corollary is: ignore the AZ feature entirely. You may be right, but that's
a big hit to the attractiveness of AWS.

