

Why the AWS Crash is a Good Thing. - shanecox1
https://signnow.com/blog/2011/04/22/why-the-aws-crash-is-a-good-thing/
The cloud computing world is in crisis and its a good thing for everyone in the long term.
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bradgessler
While I agree this is a good thing, the central issue in my mind is that AWS
lead a lot of folks to believe that spanning their application across multiple
availability zones was a way to protect against AWS's own failures. They spoke
at YC a few months back and recommended this as a primary strategy for dealing
with failure. None of their engineers or staff recommended spanning
applications across different physical locations.

When all of the dust settles on this mess, thats the one question I'll be
demanding from AWS. Also, how will they prevent multiple AZ's from going down
simultaneously in the future?

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mchusma
Some of this is evolving, but if it turns out AWS mislead people you are
right.

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blhack
Twitter goes down all the time, sure, facebook has dropped off, yeah...

But neither of these things have ever happened for a full day. If twitter goes
out, refreshing a few times (this was true even a couple of years ago when the
downtime was _really_ bad) usually lets you get through. The worst I remember
seeing was a few hours down.

Same goes for facebook. The worst I can recall right now is part of the oauth
system bailing out for a few hours.

AWS going out like this is an entirely different disaster. Not only was it
down for an entire day, but there were a _ton_ of eggs in the basket.

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shanecox1
I expect large companies will rethink scalability and not put all eggs in one
basket.

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Animus7
100% uptime _is_ possible, and it's possible today. Nobody complains that
their torrents are ever "down".

So to correct: 100% uptime is not possible... with a central point of failure
such as a datacenter.

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samatman
Ironically enough, I have an... interesting service provider at this location
who aggressively throttles peer connections. I've been using torrific as a
workaround, which, in turn, uses AWS.

So yes. My torrents are "down".

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Animus7
Your torrents aren't "down". In the same sense that having a theoretical
crappy ISP that blocks GMail doesn't mean your GMail is "down".

When we talk about downtime we usually mean a global outage, for most
everyone.

That's what happened at Amazon. This never happens for an active torrent. And
it's all by design.

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dhughes
How much do organizations such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Hacker News etc.
plan ahead for holidays such as Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Mother's Day,
or the last day of school, first day of University?

It seems most outages could at least be predicted somewhat just by looking at
"cultural patterns", for lack of a better phrase, from my perspective a lot of
outages seem to occur during the events I mentioned.

Add to that most people and resources may not be available as much or as
quickly during the days when it's busier making it even more likely something
will happen.

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eof
s/Why/How/

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gcb
> Why the AWS Crash is a Good Thing

because it didn't happen with me.

