awe.sm Outage Report

[Jonathan Strauss]

From 2012-03-15 09:22 UTC to 2012-03-15 09:43 UTC the entire AWS US-EAST-1 region was unavailable from the public Internet. This resulted in all components of the awe.sm platform (i.e. Redirectors, Create API, Stats API, GUI) being unavailable to our customers and their users during that period.

First of all, we apologize for this downtime and any impact it caused you or your users. While we have responded to prior AWS region-wide outages by implementing multi-region infrastructure, the specific nature of this outage (i.e. a total region-wide external network failure) rendered our existing fail-overs ineffective. Amazon has assured their customers that they are taking steps to prevent this from happening again (see http://status.aws.amazon.com/), but we are committed to mitigating our dependency on them given the lack of transparency into the underlying systems and thus our inability to adequately plan fail-over scenarios.

This is an extremely complex architectural and implementation challenge that we plan to complete in stages over the coming months with the initial focus being on multi-provider redundancy for our Redirectors followed by the Create API. We will inform this list of our progress on these tasks and are happy to answer any specific questions you may have.

Again, we offer our most sincere apologies for any impact this incident may have had on your business.

- Team awe.sm

--
Jonathan Strauss, Co-Founder
http://awe.sm

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Blog: http://jonathanhstrauss.com
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