Slashdot Mirror
Amazon EC2 May Be Experiencing Growing Pains
1sockchuck writes "Some developers using Amazon EC2 are wondering aloud whether the popularity of the cloud computing service is beginning to affect its performance. Amazon this week denied speculation that it was experiencing capacity problems after a veteran developer reported performance issues and suggested that EC2 might be oversubscribed. Meanwhile, a cloud monitoring service published charts showing increased latency on EC2 in recent weeks. The reports follow an incident over the holidays in which a DDoS on a DNS provider slowed Amazon's retail and cloud operations."
When the news came around for EC2's DDoS around Christmas, I remembered reading how Amazon began offering their services to third parties in the first place. Turns out Amazon has a sudden peak of traffic around shopping holidays and particularly Christmas.
To prepare for that, they have added enough hardware to handle the peak, but that hardware went unused the rest of the year. So they started leasing it to third parties in the form of their web services.
This immediately makes you think, ok, what happens to their ability to handle the third party apps around Christmas, when they need a lot more hardware to handle Amazon.com's traffic itself? And then this DDoS happened, which importantly overloaded not the actual app servers, but the DNS servers pointing to the app servers. So as a result the app servers experiences lower traffic for third party sites than they would have otherwise.
It's making me think, and this is of course just speculation, this may have possibly not be a genuine attack as much as a stunt to lessen the overload of their cloud services they knew they'd experience around Christmas, while having a plausible explanation for the downtime that blames it on a malicious third party.
Reading they do indeed have had (and still have) performance issues supports that speculation.