RE: [pdxalt.net] AWS unreliable?

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Lee Harding

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Dec 27, 2012, 7:00:17 PM12/27/12
to Adron Hall, pdxalt...@googlegroups.com
Has S3 ever been down? Eleven nines of durability is insane.  Even the four (or is it five) nines of availability is nothing to shake a stick at.

Thinking that static sites can't involve dynamic data shows a serious lack of imagination.  What is it you need that isn't available as a REST service that has a better uptime record than your current, old-school dynamic html site?

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From: Adron Hall
Sent: 12/27/2012 3:01 PM
To: pdxalt...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [pdxalt.net] AWS unreliable?

?  Not to be a hipster, but stop waiting for Microsoft. Just grab some Node.js/Generation/Github whatever it's called or the kazillion solutions out there for that already. There's a ton of them.

Also, not sure how static site generation is going to help in a serious outage like what happened.

Also, AWS was "partly" down, Netflix is usually prepared, but what happened was a strange mix of EBS issues. Netflix auto-recover/magic monkey didn't fling the sites back online when they were supposed to. Outage is a strong way to put it in reflection of AWS and the cloud, but more of a malfuction.  This was by no means what happened back in April of 2011. Even then, it was only 1 data center.

Summary. If you're worried about HA, you gotta be prepared for failure all the time. Netflix recovered amazingly fast in regards to what happened. It will doubtfully ever happen again in that situation - on Netflix and AWS's side of things.

But anyway, enough defending and harping.  ;)

Static sites == good if you have no real dynamic interaction or content. i.e. it wouldn't have worked for Netflix.
Dynamic content == need a good multi-datacenter replication ability in place. Unfortunately very few applications are prepared and even fewer technologies actually focus on this. Some of the good ones though are multi-node systems that you don't have to know are multi-node - such as Cloud foundry/Iron Foundry and on the back end, Riak or static chached Redis + Riak.

Oh, and on that Note, yeah I work for Basho if you guys want to talk about hard core data resiliency among outages like this.  ;)   You guys should sign up for this too:  http://www.meetup.com/Portland-Riak/events/95049492/

Seriously, it'll be a lot of fun. Come hang out, have some pizza/food/whatever we have and probably beer/drinks etc. and talk .NET, ALT.NET, Big Data and Riak awesomeness.

-Adron

Adron B Hall
Iron Foundry Project: http://www.ironfoundry.org


On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 8:02 AM, Lee Harding <muir.lee...@orst.edu> wrote:
Hyperbole aside, it is ironic that the customer playing a marque role onstage at re:Invent conference was a few weeks later suffering a high-profile outage.  If you are really, really concerned with having your site available every second of every day, then support this uservoice request for static website support for Visual Studio -- it's the only way to get there:






On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 9:35 PM, Justin Collum <jco...@gmail.com> wrote:
Seems like there have been a number of high profile outages on AWS lately. 


Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) Web Services (AWS) couldn't have picked a worse time to have a service outage for its Netflix customers. Just as thousands of Netflix users were settling in on Christmas Eve to watch a movie at home, AWS went down.

"We're sorry for the Christmas Eve outage. Terrible timing! Engineers are working on it now. Stay tuned to @Netflixhelps for updates," Netflix tweeted at 4:25 PST, Dec. 25.


Troy Howard

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Dec 27, 2012, 7:18:13 PM12/27/12
to pdxalt...@googlegroups.com, Adron Hall
Lee: I don't think S3 has ever been down.

Adron Hall

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Dec 27, 2012, 7:19:59 PM12/27/12
to Lee Harding, pdxalt...@googlegroups.com
I actually don't think S3 itself has, they've had a few "routing" issues however that has limited access to certain points of presence. Overall, EC2 and S3 probably has better uptime than any system on Earth that is readily available right now... however, it's pretty complex and thus difficult to repair when issues do happen. But yeah, I think S3 has been up for at least a few years without actual interruption.

As for a lack of imagination, alrgiht, I'll give that one to ya. I completely spaced on that concept. Have used the REST services a million times with em' with a mere bit of JavaScript. However I still always seem to think of "static" as sites that don't really have JavaScript - just merely static HTML content. So yeah, good point.  ;)

-Adron

Adron B Hall
Iron Foundry Project: http://www.ironfoundry.org


On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 4:00 PM, Lee Harding <somerand...@gmail.com> wrote:

Adron Hall

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Dec 27, 2012, 7:23:24 PM12/27/12
to Troy Howard, pdxalt...@googlegroups.com
Troy - thanks for adding more tech bits. Super Genius you!

Also - I've had zero downtime from AWS for 3 years on my personal site. But then of course it's actually a static site distributed across 3 instances in 3 geographic zones with a replicated database on the backend. As long as their routing doesn't botch up - it'll probably never have downtime. Since the traffic is so low that even increases that chance.

Really though, if you want HA, you could just kill the traffic. That'd probably work wonders!  :)

Adron B Hall
Iron Foundry Project: http://www.ironfoundry.org


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