Amazon Outage Shows Limits of Failover 'Zones'

jbrodkin writes "For cloud customers willing to pony up a little extra cash, Amazon has an enticing proposition: Spread your application across multiple availability zones for a near-guarantee that it won't suffer from downtime. 'By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location,' Amazon says in pitching its Elastic Compute Cloud service. But the availability zones are close together and can fail at the same time, as we saw today. The outage and ongoing attempts to restore service call into question the effectiveness of the availability zones, and put a spotlight on Amazon's failure to provide load balancing between the east and west coasts."

Comments

have your own servers

[Dan667]

or use a completely different company for redundancy. I think that is the lesson here.

Re:have your own servers

[rudy_wayne]

This incident illustrates once again why you need to put your stuff on your own servers and not someone else's. All computer systems will fail occasionally. There's no such thing as 100% uptime. However, when your own servers fail you can get your own people working on it right away and it's their number one priority. When your stuff is on someone else's servers, you're at their mercy. It will get fixed when they get around to it, and, they have more customers than just you, so you might not be first on the priority list. Or second. Or third. Or tenth.