Dark Day In the AWS Cloud: Big Name Sites Go Down 182
An outage of one company's servers might only affect that company's customers — but when a major data center for Amazon hits kinks, sites that rely on the AWS cloud services all suffer from the downtime. That's what happened today, when several major sites or online services (like Instagram and AirBnB) were knocked temporarily offline, evidently because of problems at an Amazon data center in Northern Virginia. From TechCrunch's coverage of the outage: "The deluge of tweets that accompanied the services’ initial hiccups first started at around 4 p.m. Eastern time, and only increased in intensity as users found they couldn’t share pictures of their food or their meticulously crafted video snippets. Some further poking around on Twitter and beyond revealed that some other services known to rely on AWS — Netflix, IFTTT, Heroku and Airbnb to name a few — have been experiencing similar issues today."
Running List of Cloud Outages? (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought this might already exist, but I'm not finding it with a quick Google search. Seems like it's a thing that could get ad views from some decent IT audiences.
Re:Say what you will (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Say what you will (Score:5, Insightful)
No they didn't lie. You can set things up that way-simply set up your servers in multiple data centers(AWS availability zones) and load balance between them. It's foolish to just throw things up in the cloud and think magically I won't ever have to worry about downtime ever again. It's foolish-but a lot of companies act this way.
Somehow cloud hosting is taken as the silver bullet to prevent outages-it isn't. You still have to architect things the way you would normally if you're looking for things like disaster recovery, high availability, etc...etc..
Re:Say what you will (Score:3, Insightful)
No they didn't lie. You can set things up that way-simply set up your servers in multiple data centers(AWS availability zones) and load balance between them. It's foolish to just throw things up in the cloud and think magically I won't ever have to worry about downtime ever again. It's foolish-but a lot of companies act this way.
But that's the problem. *THEY* (i.e., AWS or whoever) are supposed to take care of all that stuff. They're supposed to worry about "uptime" and fixing things when they break and having redundant systems that kick in when something breaks so that there's no loss of service. That's the whole point of putting stuff in the "cloud".
If * I * have to worry about that stuff then I might as well just do it myself and not give my money to Amazon.
Everybody that is surprised is stupid... (Score:5, Insightful)
That things like this will happen with a cloud infrastructure are obvious. That the reliability claims made by the cloud providers are fantasy is also obvious. As soon as they start to do "uptime or else" (meaning you get tons of money as downtime compensation), things may be different. but they will not do that. At this time, the only thing you can do is change to a different cloud provider, which will have the same issues. Uptime guarantees without penalties when failed to meet them are worthless.
Re:Everybody that is surprised is stupid... (Score:5, Insightful)
We built a decentralized network called The Internet, even capable of withstanding global thermonuclear war -- packets rerouted moments after a city disappears from the mesh... And folks use data silos? Protip: Don't centralize services, that's daft in terms of both uptime and congestion.
Re:Say what you will (Score:2, Insightful)
No they didn't lie. You can set things up that way-simply set up your servers in multiple data centers(AWS availability zones) and load balance between them. It's foolish to just throw things up in the cloud and think magically I won't ever have to worry about downtime ever again.
But that was one of the big promises of "the cloud": that you'd never have to worry about the nitty-gritty of network administration again, your provider would handle all that for you. If that isn't the case, then you gain nothing and might as well host the data yourself.
Re:Say what you will (Score:4, Insightful)
But that's the problem. *THEY* (i.e., AWS or whoever) are supposed to take care of all that stuff. They're supposed to worry about "uptime" and fixing things when they break and having redundant systems that kick in when something breaks so that there's no loss of service. That's the whole point of putting stuff in the "cloud".
Boy have you been fed a line. Read the SLA. If it's not in there; then you don't get it.
If you think the cloud provider is clustering your instance and giving you HA; then AWS is not for you.
Amazon provides availability zones you can provision separate instances storage and networks in. If your application cannot survive the failure of an instance and the failure of an entire availability zone, then you don't have HA, and Amazon won't give it to you -- your app may be inappropriate for AWS, if HA is required.
Re:Say what you will (Score:5, Insightful)
"nothing it does is new or cheaper than hosting 10 years ago."
Welcome to the wonderful world of marketing. Sell people what they already have for 50% more.
Realistically (Score:3, Insightful)
Chances are that there are no providers that offer a true 99.999% uptime. If you demand that, you need to be building your code to run in a HA cluster with nationwide dispersion. (For reference, you get 5.25 minutes of downtime across a whole year).
99.999% uptime is also completely unnecessary, but sounds really good to management until you talk cost.
Pretend this was a US government outage (Score:4, Insightful)
The right wing talking heads on TV would be squealing like stuck pigs. They would be screaming about "gubment" waste and incompetence, and start floating bills to privatize the FAA (or whomever). You'd get the same response on Slashdot as well.
Meanwhile in real life AWS, Google, and NASDAQ have all had dramatic failures in recent weeks. Although NASDAQ got a fair amount of coverage, and Google got some mention, AWS has been pretty much below the radar for the mainstream media. No one is making dramatic statements on TV about how Google is run by a bunch of idiots, or NASDAQ, a quasi-governmental entity, should be nationalized, because when it fails the entire economy is as risk. As far a critical comments, it's the sound of crickets.
Clearly, there is a double standard. When there are problems with technology in the public sector, it's all hostility and table thumping. Similar failures in the private sector are treated like natural disasters completely beyond human control. According to common rhetoric, the private sector is always better then the public sector. Yet when the private sector fails, no one ever compares it to the well functioning public sector.
There is clearly a lot of hypocrisy in bashing the government. A lot of political power is at stake, and along with that goes a lot of money. This situation makes some people very happy, because they are getting what they want, both in public policy and private profit.
Re:actually, no (Score:4, Insightful)
Whether they're valid claims or not is irrelevant, they are undeniably being made.
Like "core business" Every time I hear that, it's from a contractor or someone who just spoke to a contractor, and it's always about why it's good to outsource everything to contractors. It doesn't take long for that to be a pattern.
Now, ask cloud computing companies how much they charge, compared to renting tin. It's always cheaper, except when it's not, and even then, it's cheaper to use the more expensive cloud because tin can go down, the cloud can't, or something like that.