Lightning Strikes Amazon's Cloud (Really)

The Register has details on a recent EC2 outage that is being blamed on a lightning strike that zapped a power distribution unit of the data center. The interruption only lasted around 6 hours, but the irony should last much longer. "While Amazon was correcting the problem, it told customers they had the option of launching new server instances to replace those that went down. But customers were also able to wait for their original instances to come back up after power was restored to the hardware in question."

Comments

Irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't cloud computing supposed to tackle such instances?

Re:Irony?

[evanbd]

Perhaps that's the problem. I think lightning rods are supposed to be more coppery than irony.

God here...

[Deus.1.01]

Is the message clear?

-RMS

Inconcievable!

[binaryspiral]

While everyone is talking up the cloud and how resilient it is... this is just yet another example to never put all your eggs in one basket. If your service is so damn important that it can't go down - have it hosted in two places.

Notice, Amazon.com didn't go down... :)

Re:What irony?

[mail2345]

I think the poster means popular irony, not irony as it actually means. Popular irony is like getting a fly in your white wine. Regular irony is not wearing your tin foil hat on the one day someone actually does beam thoughts into your brain.

Re:What irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

Regular irony is not wearing your tin foil hat on the one day someone actually does beam thoughts into your brain.

Nope. You've still got it wrong... That's still Morissette irony.

Re:Lightning once striked our office building.

[xrayspx]

I'm thinking critically because Amazon, EMC, VMWare, etc bill The Cloud as a mystical place where you throw your shit and then it's universally available 100%. Nothing bad happens in The Cloud.

So what's the deal with having all copies of these VMs in one datacenter? That's not very The Cloud of them. Maybe they should replicate all of EC2 to GFS. Would The Cloud win then?

Customers being given the option of redeploying their VMs or waiting an unspecified period of time until The Cloud is back online isn't The Cloud we were promised.

/cloud

Re:What irony?

[quanticle]

Perhaps they were referring to the irony of Amazon's EC2 being affected by one of the very natural disasters it advertises protection against.

Its rather like an "unsinkable" vessel going down on her maiden voyage.

Re:What irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real irony here is that tinfoil hats are actually required in order to beam thoughts into your head...

Re:Lightning once striked my friends house.

[Kotoku]

In the civilized world, we just call those "walk through holes" doors.

Re:Do any of you know how they survived?

[RsG]

I'm reading between the lines here (it doesn't actually say this in TFA), but it sounds like this was a direct hit. Not an outage, which is a different beast.

A UPS is about as useful in this instance as antibiotics against a virus - it's a solution to a different problem. Surge protectors don't help much either, not unless the strike was a fairly mild and/or remote one. You could switch over to a disconnected UPS system every time there's a thunderstorm on the horizon, but that seems needlessly complicated and expensive.

That being said, the GP referred to an outage, so you've quite correctly answered his question; it's just the wrong question to ask in this instance. And of course I could be misreading (or Amazon could be misrepresenting) the exact nature of the failure - if it were a regular outage, none of the above would apply.