Outage at Amazon S3 Cloud, Effects and Next Steps

[David Kay, MLS]

Hi everyone,

Many have been wary of the wholesale move of digital archives to the cloud, so you may want to read a few articles about Amazon's problems and effects with their Simple Storage Service (S3) outage from yesterday.  Though it only lasted 219 minutes and you may not have noticed the effects on your website,
there were certain sites were unable to deliver specific assets of a webpage, or an entire webpage altogether, as a result of the interruption.

NYMag: "Even Amazon employees themselves can’t get in. At a demonstration to developers in Chicago this afternoon, a speaker reportedly spoke of the service’s steadfast reliability right before getting shut out of the system."  http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/02/amazon-web-services-is-down-if-you-didnt-already-know.html

from Ars Technical: "When the Amazon infrastructure-as-a-service cloud goes down, Internet users are going to notice. Amazon Web Services, which powers a whole bunch of websites and online services, has been struggling today, and numerous sites that rely on Amazon infrastructure have gone offline as a result. Appropriately enough, "Is It Down Right Now?," a site that tells you whether other sites are down, has been struggling to stay online.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/amazon-cloud-sputters-for-hours-and-a-boatload-of-websites-go-offline/

From Network World: "According to internet monitoring platform Catchpoint, Amazon Web Service’s Simple Storage Service (S3) experienced a three hour and 39 minute disruption on Tuesday that had cascading effects across other Amazon cloud services and many internet sites that rely on the popular cloud platform."

NW also includes some advice such as : "AWS recommends at a minimum to spread workloads across multiple Availability Zones.
The ultimate protection would be to deploy the application across multiple providers, for example using Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform or some internal or hosted infrastructure resource as a backup.
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3175143/cloud-computing/5-lessons-from-amazon-s-s3-cloud-blunder-and-how-to-prepare-for-the-next-one.html

http://www.networkworld.com/article/3175143/cloud-computing/5-lessons-from-amazon-s-s3-cloud-blunder-and-how-to-prepare-for-the-next-one.html


Was did anyone else notice anything?


dk
###

[nickp...@gmail.com]

Thanks David!  I'm at Bowling Green State University in Ohio now, and we definitely had some problems due to the outage.  I was thinking about this very thing yesterday, and how risky the reliance on AWS can be in terms of digital preservation.

Nick

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[Frederic Grevin]

Nick and David, did anyone – to your knowledge – actually lose anything (files, data, etc.) besides access?

 

Network World’s advice is very good, providing (a) you can afford it, and (b) the Internet itself is still up and running (an assumption).

 

Best regards to all!

 

Fred

════════════════════════

Frederic J. Grevin

fgr...@edc.nyc

212-312-3903 (w)

 

[nickp...@gmail.com]

No data loss that I know of, just the interruption in access.  That is indeed good advice having distribution across providers.

Sent from my iPhone