EC2 Outage Shows How Much the Net Relies On Amazon

An anonymous reader writes "Much has been written about the recent EC2/EBS outage, but Keir Thomas at PC World has a different take: it's shown how much cutting-edge Internet infrastructure relies on Amazon, and we should be grateful. Quoting: 'Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy, access to the means of distribution, and rapid evolution.'" An article at O'Reilly comes to a similarly positive conclusion from a different angle.

Comments

It also shows...

[Anonymous Coward]

why putting everything "in the cloud" is a stupid idea.

Re:It also shows...

[GodfatherofSoul]

Clouds aren't the problem. It's contracting your cloud out to a third party that's the problem.

Re:It also shows...

[camperslo]

Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy, access to the means of distribution, and rapid evolution

Spirit of the internet? Some on seeing Amazons' passing judgement on Wikileaks might think it more aligned with a certain corporate spirit than a spirit of the internet. If they're really support democracy, which can't function properly with a poorly informed public, maybe they shouldn't be the ones to decide whether or not someone is a journalist.

Hardware doesn't make spirit. What people are doing, and the thoughts that drive the choices made probably do.

They are still contented to profit from the sale of books about WikiLeaks.

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-WikiLeaks-Assange-Dangerous-Website/dp/030795191X

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/dec/11/wikileaks-amazon-denial-democracy-lieberman

Re:It also shows...

[thetoadwarrior]

Seeing how the internet is the cloud where else do you expect internet sites to go?

Re:It also shows...

[nothings]

Don't forget the one-click patent. True democracy/spirit of the Internet my ass.

Re:It also shows...

[Adrian Lopez]

Clouds aren't the problem. It's contracting your cloud out to a third party that's the problem.

Exactly. What I'd like to see is an open cloud platform that makes it easy to distribute nodes between multiple unrelated ISPs instead of all the servers being handled by a single monolithic entity such as Amazon or Google.

Re:It also shows...

[ScrewMaster]

Seeing how the internet is the cloud where else do you expect internet sites to go?

No, if you throw a packet into the "cloud" known as the Internet, it usually comes out where you wanted it to go, and you don't need to know the path it took to get there. "Cloud computing" is an entirely different concept (or, rather, a set of somewhat related concepts that mean different things to different people.) The Internet just schleps data from here to there.

Re:It also shows...

[Compaqt]

>What I'd like to see is an open cloud platform

http://www.openstack.org/

You've got Rackspace + Softlayer and about 60 other companies.

Re:It also shows...

[thetoadwarrior]

There is no guarantee of that which is why the internet protocols are set up to account for lost packets. Besides the specific technologies used in 'cloud computing' aren't new and have been part of the internet for some time and they work. Someone repackaging these technologies under a more marketable name doesn't change that fact.

My cloud is fine

[Anonymous Coward]

All my websites are fine, which is what my high profile clients expect.

That's because we use Microsoft Windows Servers and Sql Databases. Amazon can't take us down.

I can't imagine why someone would outsource or cloudsource stuff that is this mission critical.

Re:My cloud is fine

[hawguy]

Because for most companies, a cloud provider can provide better uptime than they can manage by themselves.

All my websites are fine, which is what my high profile clients expect.

I can't imagine why someone would outsource or cloudsource stuff that is this mission critical.

The same company that relies on a single resource zone at EC2 is the same kind of company that will host all of their servers at a single coloc, or worse, host them on-site with a single internet connection and have no backup generator.

Anyone that uses Amazon EC2 to host servers and doesn't have backup servers in a difference availability zone (and region) get what they paid for -- a single point of failure. Any datacenter or coloc is subject to failure no matter how much redundancy is built in to the design - tornadoes, flooding, fire, equipment failure, accidents and other forces can take down an entire datacenter.

That's because we use Microsoft Windows Servers and Sql Databases. Amazon can't take us down.

It's not clear why your choice of a MS platform ensures uptime. Why does having Microsoft Windows Servers and Sql Databases keep Amazon from taking you down? You could host those Windows servers on an Amazon EC2 instance. Or does MS SQL/Server have some anti-amazon-takedown feature that keeps it running even if it's on Amazon's infrastructure and that infrastructure goes down?

Re:My cloud is fine

[thetoadwarrior]

Of course. The botnet authors have a vested interest in keeping your system up.

Re:My cloud is fine

[RobertM1968]

All my websites are fine, which is what my high profile clients expect.

That's because we use Microsoft Windows Servers and Sql Databases.

Really? I've found both such products to be unsuitable for the demand we put on such infrastructures - unless I throw a lot more hardware at them. With 1/20th the traffic, and 6% the userbase, our forums crawled on Windows Server and MSSQL Server. We switched to Apache and MySQL, and even running the greatly more database intensive (than the Windows solution we were provided) Simple Machines Forum, we need a lot less hardware than we previously did when we had so much less traffic.

Re:My cloud is fine

[darth dickinson]

Eve Online...single shard, single universe... MS SQL server.

Re:My cloud is fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Eve Online...single shard, single universe... MS SQL server.

And highly specialized storage hardware, of course. Which is very cool in itself. But yeah, without that crucial part, the whole thing would very much not fly.

In short: MS SQL Server can perform, but it'll cost you dearly.

Re:My cloud is fine

[RobertM1968]

Eve Online...single shard, single universe... MS SQL server.

What AC below said...

This is the persistence layer of EVE Online. There is only one database server running Microsoft SQL Server 2008. This is backed up using online backups to the 'old' TQ DB hardware, a fiber channel RAID array. The current database resides entirely on solid state disk drives, two RAMSAN400 and 2 RAMSAN500 units from Texas Memory Systems. They are not SSD RAID disks, but rather single disk drives capable of high data throughput but crucially fully random requests. On traditional hard drives this incurs a lag due to disk seek operations while read heads are placed in the correct position on the platter and the data is read out.

At peak hours as of 2007 the database handles around 2-2.5k transactions per second, which generate roughly 40,000 input/output operations per second on the disks.

The server used is an IBM x3850 M2 server with 128 GB RAM and two 2.6 GHz six core Xeons (Dunnington) running Windows server 2008 x64 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

I could do that on 1/8th the hardware using a different DB solution.

Re:My cloud is fine

[dkf]

All my websites are fine, which is what my high profile clients expect.

That's because we use Microsoft Windows Servers and Sql Databases. Amazon can't take us down.

I can't imagine why someone would outsource or cloudsource stuff that is this mission critical.

Either you're at an organization that has multiple geographically-distributed datacenters and you've replicated everything so that losing any single datacenter will not cripple things (difficult, but should be possible with any OS exposed to the application level) or you're critically vulnerable to the Backhoe Effect. If someone drills through the only fiber to your servers, they will be taken offline from your client's perspective. (Power is often an issue too, as it takes a lot of electrical energy to run a whole datacenter for 24 hours.) The sanest way to deal with this is for the services to be geographically replicated, which costs. (It's a bit like buying insurance, except that instead of compensating you after disaster strikes, it instead allows you to keep going through disaster.) Since not many organizations have multiple geographically distributed datacenters, most folks handle this by outsourcing some (or even all) of the hosting.

Another analogy: sewage handling is almost certainly mission critical to most organizations, as without it, it's hard to have productive employees. Yet very few organizations own their own sewage treatment plant; instead, they outsource that critical non-core service to a specialist. Guess what? A lot businesses (especially SMEs) feel the same way about servers; it's not their core business but they need it support their core business, so they outsource to a specialist. The fine details are different, but the business perspective is the same.

"Cloudsource" is just a buzzwordification of outsource (taking into account the interesting shorter timescales involved).

Re:My cloud is fine

[Kalriath]

Your forums crawl on your current infrastructure, so what's your point?

Multiple Locations

[WrongSizeGlass]

Amazon has an option to have another Amazon location serve as the failover for your services. Yes, it costs more, but it does exactly what it's supposed to when this type of thing happens. If your backup/disaster recover plan requires as close to 100% uptime as possible you'll want to pay the extra for this type of protection.

Re:Multiple Locations

[Anonymous Coward]

You want me to pay Company X extra money so that if Company X fucks up, their fuck up won't take my operation out? Sounds very similar to a billing scheme developed by the mafia.

Re:Multiple Locations

[Anonymous Coward]

So this is Amazon way of saying "pay us more or your website will be unreliable", as we can see from this demonstrat...eh, accident?

Hey you - get off of my cloud!

[Anonymous Coward]

>I can't imagine why someone would outsource or cloudsource stuff that is this mission critical.

The short term advantage of downsizing the internal IT department is a big part of it.

Also - it's buzzword compliant.

Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[Hartree]

This article seems to be an apology for Amazon.

Basicly it says "We went down, and took down lots of important stuff. That shows just how important we are and that lots of people use us. Thus, our cloud is a good thing."

The logic of that doesn't quite work.

I agree that it's a useful tool, but there are a lot of things that don't make sense to put in the cloud.

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[WrongSizeGlass]

I agree that it's a useful tool, but there are a lot of things that don't make sense to put in the cloud.

I always feel better when anything that is mission critical is in-house. Cloud based (and regular internet based) services can become inaccessible for your business if you simply lose your internet connection - it doesn't require all of Amazon to bite the dust.

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[mjwalshe]

So what they are saying in the style of Jeremy Clarkson " Where rubbish give us money "

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[hawguy]

I always feel better when anything that is mission critical is in-house. Cloud based (and regular internet based) services can become inaccessible for your business if you simply lose your internet connection - it doesn't require all of Amazon to bite the dust.

But if having your application available to the outside world is mission-critical to the outside world, you're almost always better off colocating it with providers in multiple physical locations.

Even for internal apps that are necessary for your business, you may be better off outsourcing, since if your building catches on fire, you can send employees home to let them continue working. Few companies have the resources to build a truly redundant hosting infrastructure across multiple regions.

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[Anonymous Coward]

Basicly it says "We went down, and took down lots of important stuff. That shows just how important we are and that lots of people use us. Thus, our cloud is a good thing."

lol @ Reddit being included in "important stuff"

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[Anonymous Coward]

>but there are a lot of things that don't make sense to put in the cloud.

For holiday snaps of people / places you don't remember, there's the cloud.

For EVERYTHING ELSE, there's a decent backup strategy.

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[segedunum]

Hmmmm, yer. The whole apology is just not working for me.

Yes, you could architect much easier with cloud platforms to failover in different regions of the world, and Reese is simply plugging his own company's stuff on that one. However, that just makes things more expensive and negates the cost effectiveness of using cloud services in terms of more servers and increased complexity. Will most businesses really need to do that given that they could afford to put their stuff in a single data centre somewhere and when a sever fails simply restore from a backup and not be down for two days?

I just don't get the apologist's view of this at all. If you need and can afford to build that kind of infrastructure then that's great, but for the vast majority of businesses using cloud platforms their applications just don't warrant it.

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[Anonymous Coward]

Even for internal apps that are necessary for your business, you may be better off outsourcing, since if your building catches on fire, you can send employees home to let them continue working.

What makes the outsourcing company's datacenter less likely to catch fire?

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[Rakishi]

You're stuck in a non-vm mentality it seems so I'm not sure why you're talking about things you don't understand.

However, that just makes things more expensive and negates the cost effectiveness of using cloud services in terms of more servers and increased complexity.

How so? Why do you need that many more servers, you're either splitting traffic (so roughly the same number of servers) or simply having enough servers to pick up backups. Now data storage of duplicate backups may add some costs but that's neither servers nor complexity.

And as I said before and you seem to not understand, this is a cloud. If you main servers go down you don't need to have an identical copy of those servers running somewhere else 24/7. You simply create those copies on the fly. They cost you nothing until they're needed and when they are you're not paying for your main servers anyway.

Will most businesses really need to do that given that they could afford to put their stuff in a single data centre somewhere and when a sever fails simply restore from a backup and not be down for two days?

You're assuming they can restore from backup, often companies don't want to lose the data since the last backup unless there is no choice. They also need to get a new server, image it, test it and actually put it in the data center. Sure they can automate it all but that, to quote your own words, that negates cost effectiveness.

It's also nothing that you can't do even more easily with amazon. My server was down at amazon for maybe 12 hours, that's when I noticed and simply reloaded it from backup in a different working availability zone. Took a few minutes. Had I cared enough to keep backups in a different region then I could have simply reloaded it instantly over there.

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[dave562]

My server was down at amazon for maybe 12 hours, that's when I noticed and simply reloaded it from backup in a different working availability zone. Took a few minutes. Had I cared enough to keep backups in a different region then I could have simply reloaded it instantly over there.

How did you architect the data storage for your applications? Is the data kept with the servers? How much data are you working with?

It seems to me that Amazon is decent for the web tier, or any application with a relatively small data set. Yet the idea of spinning up multiple terabytes of data in an alternate location seems to be too good to be true.

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[Steeltoe]

Nice, so colocating means you give your code and data to thieves and governments. Just great doing business with you!

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on fire suppression systems to protect their investment?

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[danbeck]

You are assuming that Amazon does a better job than the OP. Money/size/fame doesn't make something reliable. Not saying that it's necessarily one way or another, but only morons assume things.

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[cavebison]

Basicly it says "We went down, and took down lots of important stuff. That shows just how important we are and that lots of people use us. Thus, our cloud is a good thing."

That's exactly not what the article said. To summarise, it says, "any server setup has its flaws, but the advantages of Amazon to startups and the democratisation of the web is enough to be thankful for." And I'd agree.

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[Khyber]

What makes you think the fire suppression systems themselves won't catch fire and thus utterly fail?

The fact that they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars? Go look at some nuclear centrifuges sometime.

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[pjbass]

The issue today though isn't in-house vs. colocated, it's cost. Most of these companies don't have the cash to build proper infrastructure to house their services locally. The cloud services from various companies, like Amazon, take care of the physical maintenance and cooling and power, etc.

Even if your local datacenter housed mission-critical data, I'm sure it's possible to come up with 100 scenarios where you could lose all connectivity to your locally-housed infrastructure (power company accidentally digs up your comm lines, etc.).

The cloud isn't perfect, but neither is in-house colocation. It depends on how much money you want to spend for the control. Even with the control, you can't plan for the worst and still remain cost-effective. This is just a crappy situation that is amplified given how many people rely on the services.

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[Anonymous Coward]

The logic of that doesn't quite work.

The logic is very easy: We are important, send us more $$$ for having physical different locations.

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[MichaelSmith]

In comparison to what?

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[segedunum]

You're stuck in a non-vm mentality it seems so I'm not sure why you're talking about things you don't understand.

I do understand it sweetheart because I do it for a fucking living. Give me a break with these Slashdot weenies.

How so? Why do you need that many more servers, you're either splitting traffic (so roughly the same number of servers) or simply having enough servers to pick up backups. Now data storage of duplicate backups may add some costs but that's neither servers nor complexity.

Understanding how EC2 works might be a good start for you. You need to replicate your machine images across different regions as well as incur traffic costs for backup and/or replication depending on how much data you can afford to lose. It's excessive complexity.

And as I said before and you seem to not understand, this is a cloud. If you main servers go down you don't need to have an identical copy of those servers running somewhere else 24/7. You simply create those copies on the fly. They cost you nothing until they're needed and when they are you're not paying for your main servers anyway.

That's because you have no idea what you're talking about and simply don't know the practicalities of what's involved.

You're assuming they can restore from backup, often companies don't want to lose the data since the last backup unless there is no choice. They also need to get a new server, image it, test it and actually put it in the data center. Sure they can automate it all but that, to quote your own words, that negates cost effectiveness.

What does this meaningless claptrap mean? You can have virtual machines in your own data centre you know?

It's also nothing that you can't do even more easily with amazon. My server was down at amazon for maybe 12 hours, that's when I noticed and simply reloaded it from backup in a different working availability zone. Took a few minutes.

No you didn't because this affected multiple availability zones in the same region. If you managed to do that you were simply lucky. RTFA.

Had I cared enough to keep backups in a different region then I could have simply reloaded it instantly over there.

As I've said already, that costs money in terms of replication and incurred bandwidth costs between regions. It simply isn't that easy and I doubt whether you use EC2 at all to be honest.

Re:Clouds: Up in the air and foggy:

[segedunum]

How did you architect the data storage for your applications? Is the data kept with the servers? How much data are you working with?

Because he hasn't actually done what he says he has. Note that he says he got this running by moving to another availability zone when it was multiple availability zones in one region that were affected.

Ehr.. Wikileaks?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Quoting: 'Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy, access to the means of distribution, and rapid evolution.'"

Yeah, right.

Except they didn't work.

[pavon]

A large number of people that are experiencing this outage, did pay for multiple availability zones, and it didn't help them.

Re:Except they didn't work.

[el_tedward]

I guess what we should learn from this is to put your failover in separate regions, not separate availability zones?

Re:Except they didn't work.

[WrongSizeGlass]

From the NYT article:

Big companies, that have decided to put crucial operations on Amazon computers are apt to pay up for the equivalent of computing insurance, analysts say. Netflix, the movie rental site, has become a large customer of the Amazon cloud. Most of its Web technology — customer movie queues, search tools and the like — runs in Amazon data centers.

Netflix said it had sailed through the last couple of days unscathed. “That’s because Netflix has taken full advantage of Amazon Web Services’ redundant cloud architecture,” which insures against technical malfunctions in any one location, said Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman.

Sounds like it worked for some.

Re:Except they didn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would mod you up if I had mod points, as this is crucial.

Re:Except they didn't work.

[codepunk]

It worked just fine I was in the effected zone and just failed over to the west coast region. I actually could have stayed on east coast as our infrastructure does not have single points of failure.

Re:Except they didn't work.

[Guspaz]

Paying for multiple availability zones is not the same as paying for multiple locations. There are multiple availability zones in a single datacenter. Netflix got it right, they spread their infrastructure over multiple physical locations, and didn't suffer any downtime despite losing a significant chunk of their infrastructure; it was business as usual.

Like anything else, cloud computing still requires you to decide how much redundancy you're willing to pay for. If uptime is that important to you, spreading your infrastructure out over multiple datacenters is a no-brainer.

Re:Except they didn't work.

[Slutticus]

It looks like Amazon already defines the "availability zones" as areas that should be redundant (and thus not prone to being affected by other zones going down). Do they even have the capability to spread someone out across different regions?

Re:Except they didn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Compare what they're paying to having your own machine room, leased lines, fall over redundancy, back-up comms, UPSes and generators etc etc. Now come back and moan. Oh, you can't, can you. Funny how numbers make one change their view.

Re:Except they didn't work.

[hawguy]

Do they even have the capability to spread someone out across different regions?

Yes you have full control over what region your instance runs in - some regions cost more than others, the East region is cheaper than the West region.

Re:Except they didn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon doesn't load-balance across regions, so building a unified service that crosses regions is exceedingly difficult. You also have to pay for all the bandwidth used to replicate across regions.

dom

Re:Except they didn't work.

[Rakishi]

Life isn't easy. Non-cloud server backups also aren't easy to do but you'd be called an utter fool for not doing so.

If you're so lazy or incompetent that you can't do what can't be done in a nice pretty GUI with three clicks then you shouldn't be in charge of servers. Cloud or otherwise.

Re:Except they didn't work.

[rsborg]

I guess what we should learn from this is to put your failover in separate regions, not separate availability zones?

Apparently, data transfer between AZs is cheap or free, while transferring data between regions is effectively transmitting them over the open internet, and counts towards your bandwidth allotment/cost, so it's sometimes prohibitively expensive to failover across regions... it would almost be less expensive to just failover to another hosting provider (which may be even more stable than sticking with Amazon).

This outage was a big black-eye for Amazon, as their recommended way to failover was used, and promptly failed for large sites, employing very smart people.

Re:Except they didn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

It really depends upon the type of traffic you have. Netflix offers what is ultimately a file download/streaming site. Uploads are done periodically in bulk from official channels. Site like slashdot or reddit which have continual updates provided from its users are very difficult to locate in multiple geographic locations because you want all locations to have the same content simultaneously and for updates to happen instantly in all locations. Given the speed of light this is very difficult.

Re:Except they didn't work.

[CAIMLAS]

The region isn't going to matter if their internal infrastructure manages the clusters (and that's what they are - cloud 'clusters' ) are all 'centrally managed', and that management structure is what failed.

Re:Except they didn't work.

[Khyber]

"I guess what we should learn from this is to put your failover in separate regions, not separate availability zones?"

No, you keep a backup ON SITE.

Christ, even my website has an emergency backup server. While Amazon was fucking everyone else, I was still happily online doing business as usual.

I have said repeatedly that cloud computing wasn't going to be worth a shit. Go ask Reddit how its working out for them right now. Go ask Microsoft about their little fuckup.

Re:Except they didn't work.

[Khyber]

"Non-cloud server backups also aren't easy to do but you'd be called an utter fool for not doing so."

What are you talking about? It was ungodly simple for me to do, and my backup server sits right here in my living room. My main hosting provider stops responding and my system automatically kicks in to pick up. I may have ten seconds of downtime before my backup starts.

Took less than 20 minutes to setup. But of course, this is why you DO IT YOURSELF instead of relying upon someone else to fuck it up for you.

Re:Except they didn't work.

[lonecrow]

netflix.ca was down. So they were not unscathed just because no Americans were effected.

Re:Except they didn't work.

[jvkjvk]

Maybe those very smart people should have thought what the difference between an "availability zone" and a region was besides cost, and what that might connote.

It seems like some other very smart people got that right - e.g. Netflix.

While having this outage is a black eye for Amazon, the service tiers seemed to have worked - people who did not pay for regional redundancy did not get it, while people who did were fine.

Now, all of those smart people can ask themselves if ponying up the cash is worth it or if they need some other solution. I would hope that this time they try to understand what they are actually buying, though.

Regards.

Forget cloud computing!

[stopacop]

I'll stick to my setup of a dedicated server and virtual private servers across the globe rather than putting all my eggs in one basket with Amazon and "cloud computing"! It may be a little bit more in terms of operating costs, but it has true failover in the event of an outage!

Re:Forget cloud computing!

[hawguy]

I'll stick to my setup of a dedicated server and virtual private servers across the globe rather than putting all my eggs in one basket with Amazon and "cloud computing"! It may be a little bit more in terms of operating costs, but it has true failover in the event of an outage!

Then your app doesn't really need a dynamic cloud.

Some companies have applications that run on a dozen servers during normal times, and need to scale to over a hundred servers during peak peak periods (i.e. a new product launch). With EC2, they can scale automatically and programatically and can spread the virtual servers across multiple regions for additional redundancy. All with a single API.

Re:Forget cloud computing!

[stopacop]

Do you get a commission for making posts like this? ;-)

Re:Forget cloud computing!

[nhat11]

And yet it's still more reliable than what you have!

Re:Forget cloud computing!

[nurb432]

I'll stick to my setup of a dedicated server and virtual private servers across the globe rather than putting all my eggs in one basket with Amazon and "cloud computing"!

I hope that was sarcasm and you really are not that stupid.

Re:Forget cloud computing!

[Anonymous Coward]

With EC2, they can scale automatically and programatically and can spread the virtual servers across multiple regions for additional redundancy. All with a single API.

That sure as fuck didn't seem to be the case these past few days.

Re:Forget cloud computing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it isn't. The OP's sites are still up and working fine, while even many big-name sites (like reddit) are still feeling the impact of this Amazon incident.

Re:Forget cloud computing!

[hawguy]

With EC2, they can scale automatically and programatically and can spread the virtual servers across multiple regions for additional redundancy. All with a single API.

That sure as fuck didn't seem to be the case these past few days.

Sure it was - that's why Netflix had no problems, they had instances across more than one region.

Why The Cloud?

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

Why is so much in the cloud? I've heard it touted in lots of marketing speak, but I've never worked with it.

As someone who has never worked with the cloud (shocking, I know), what are the advantages and disadvantages?

Is it basically just distributed scalable redundant web hosting run by a big company? So you're basically renting to avoid the start-up capital costs of those services and to put them in the hands of specialists, while you focus on your web apps?

Or is it more?

Re:Why The Cloud?

[x*yy*x]

It scales really well and can be significantly cheaper than buying your own servers which you won't be using all the time anyway. They are also extremely hard to go down, as seen on these huge amounts of reporting they get if they happen to go for a bit.

I really don't get the slashdots hate against cloud providers, but I guess it's mostly just people who haven't even used such or worked with them and compared them to other solutions. The same old elitist "this new shit is useless, I like my old ways thank you very much. And now get off my lawn".

Re:Why The Cloud?

[black6host]

I'll give you an example of what some may consider "cloud computing". Say you purchase a franchise. The franchiser, as part of the deal, requires that you use their software for all accounting, dispatching techs, if applicable, reporting, maintaining your customer list etc. A few of my clients have been in this scenario. Here are the drawbacks:

1. Obvious case, servers not available. In a service industry, such as air conditioning companies etc, this mean you don't even know where your techs are supposed to be.

2. Servers are up but your internet service is down. Same scenario as above.

3. Worst case of all is what happens if there is a disagreement between the franchiser and the franchisee? Well guess what, they have all your data and that gives them the upper hand. Pay up first, ask questions later kind of deal. And once they have your money there is much less incentive to be fair about things.

These are real world scenarios and my advice to my clients (and these were already established businesses who were considering a franchise as a way to increases revenues) that they refuse unless they could run the franchiser required software in-house. I'll also state that these ventures weren't a McDonald's type of operation, the franchisers were relatively small themselves.

In summary, it depends on the application (haven't heard that one before have you? :) _)

The franchises promote the fact that there are few support and infrastructure requirements at the client site, which is true, but they neglect to mention the other aspects. Who wants someone else to completely control your companies data? I realize that this is just a segment of "cloud computing" in general but it's being sold to businesses every day.

Re:Why The Cloud?

[mini me]

The cloud represents a black box that abstracts the underlying network topology.

You might send your data to a server in Germany and retrieve it from a server in the USA. When you put something in the cloud you do not have to worry about problems like this because the cloud provider already has a hot backup ready to take the slack in another part of the world. You don't need to know or care how it happens, it just works. S3 is an Amazon example of a cloud service. You send your file to S3 and Amazon takes the responsibility of ensuring that it is available even if a datacenter is blown to smithereens.

EC2 and EBS are not the cloud. There is no abstraction of the datacenter. Amazon leaves it up to you to choose which datacenter you wish to work in. This can allow you to easily build a cloud application on top of their physical infrastructure, but it is up to you to make it "the cloud". We witnessed so many failures because the applications were not cloud applications, just standard hosted services.

Re:Why The Cloud?

[tragedy]

Hmm, considering how long "the cloud" has been a buzzword, doesn't it seem like an awful lot of unscheduled downtime if there have been enough events already for people to be claiming that they aren't given a fair shake by the media when they go down. After all, if the media have reported on it several times, it's happened several times. That's more unscheduled downtime than your typical web server gets in a few years.

Perhaps if they hadn't gone with a word that means fuzzy, insubstantial and ephemeral to describe their services people wouldn't have the same reservations about it. Maybe it's also because IT people don't like their managers to say "I just heard about this neat new thing, let's abandon the system we have now to pursue this" against their advice, then have to deal with being screamed at by their managers later when everything is down and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it because they've effectively ceded all control to a third party service provider who has not managed, thus far, to establish themselves as particularly safe or reliable.

The apologists whose articles are linked in this Slashdot story seem to think it's great that we're putting all of our eggs into the baskets of known basket droppers. Thus far I'm not impressed enough by these providers. Obviously, in order to do anything on the Internet, you have to rely on some sort of service provider, and even they have to rely on their peers. So obviously there's no way you can have total control. Nevertheless, you should still try to retain all the control you can over your own stuff.

Re:Why The Cloud?

[silanea]

[...] I really don't get the slashdots hate against cloud providers, but I guess it's mostly just people who haven't even used such or worked with them and compared them to other solutions. [...]

The Cloud is like Flash, JavaScript and many other technologies: It has its uses, but too many people mistake or abuse it for something that it is not. Too much stuff is put into "the Cloud" just so it is there, often at the expense of stability, usefulness and data protection. It has become one of those buzzwords non-technical management loves to slap on their company's website to appear modern, akin to the stupid $genericproduct 2.0 before it, and the $genericproduct 2000 before that, and the $genericproduct Professional Enterprise Doubleplus Deluxe before that. "Cloud" is the new "web-based". Or the new "with virtualisation". An interesting solution to many products, but not the Swiss Army silver bullet some companies are selling it for.

Re:Why The Cloud?

[NeutronCowboy]

Is it basically just distributed scalable redundant web hosting run by a big company? So you're basically renting to avoid the start-up capital costs of those services and to put them in the hands of specialists, while you focus on your web apps?

More or less. You can rent all kinds of stuff these days. But the idea remains the same: put the stuff that isn't your core competency into the hands of somebody who has that as their core competency, and focus on what you do best. It's basically the theory of comparative advantage put to a real world challenge, and it's working. Yes, occasionally things like an EC2 outage happen. But you don't hear the millions of times a corporate server failed and took down their own apps.

What it boils down to is trust: do you trust the other company to do a better job than you at running infrastructure and hosting services? And if you think you're better, do you think that the time and money you spend running and hosting stuff would be put to better use creating or selling your widget? If you answer yes to either question, you're better off hosting stuff in the cloud.

Re:Why The Cloud?

[silanea]

That last sentence should, of course, have read "An interesting solution to many problems [...]".

Re:Why The Cloud?

[x*yy*x]

People are unfairly giving cloud hosting here bad name anyway - EC2 doesn't handle distributing your services in that way and it's directly noted.. You have to make sure you have backup locations set up in EC2. It costs more, but it's for situations like this. That is why Netflix didn't have any problems even while they were using EC2.

If you're being stupid and taking shortcuts thinking you won't need that, well, it's your choice. You would do it with any kind of service anyway.

Re:Why The Cloud?

[thetoadwarrior]

The cloud is just that a buzzword. There technologies and idea behind the cloud are much older. It's prone to mistakes just like anything else. If anything this Amazon outage shows that people aren't using 'the cloud' properly and distributing their data across multiple data centres.

Re:Why The Cloud?

[emt377]

Why is so much in the cloud? I've heard it touted in lots of marketing speak, but I've never worked with it.

As someone who has never worked with the cloud (shocking, I know), what are the advantages and disadvantages?

Is it basically just distributed scalable redundant web hosting run by a big company? So you're basically renting to avoid the start-up capital costs of those services and to put them in the hands of specialists, while you focus on your web apps?

Or is it more?

There's a big mix-up of lots of different concepts and ideas here, to the point that the questions you ask are impossible to answer.

- EC2 is a vps-like virtual server provisioning service. You rent a virtual server instance by the hour. APIs exist for you to dynamically add and remove instances as needed. You create an image, then can fire up additional instances as you see fit. Someone like Netflix for instance, can fire up streaming servers during peak hours then shut them down at off hours.
- You can of course set up your own co-lo systems, but it will be provisioned 24/7 and will cost you more since it will be sized for peak capacity, and even during peak most of the servers will be idle much of the time due to random load variance. You can improve peak utilization by setting up your own virtual provisioning. But then you have ops costs, so unless you have a massive operational scale you'll find it cheaper to buy from AWS (or linode, rackspace, etc).
- EBS is a logical volume service. You create a volume and mount it on an EC2 instance. Like with server instances, there are API calls to dynamically create EBS volumes. You can unmount it and move it to a different server in the same datacenter, so you could use them for instance to take backup snapshots or log analysis, or similar, in addition to simply being server storage. Of course you get to build or buy the software to do all these things yourself.
- Server instances belong to groups, and have access controls set up among them. This allows you to create private 'backplane' interconnects, where some things like sql servers are only accessible to instances part of a group.
- EIPs are elastic IPs, which are IPs you lease and can then assign to any of your server instances (usually ingress and point-of-contact servers). You can move them between virtual servers as you like, and obviously would typically map DNS to them. Servers will otherwise get anonymous IP addresses, meaning they get something arbitrarily assigned. They're reachable (if you wish) from the net at large, but aren't well-known points for your service.
- AWS also provides a load distribution service. I've never used this actually; it never seemed to fit right.
- S3 is a cloud service, meaning it has no deterministic ingress and egress. It's used for content distribution: writing is expensive, reading is dirt cheap. Content stored is automatically replicated and de-replicated as needed. You have no idea where it lives, in how many copies, and how it's backed up. SLAs make promises about availability.
- Content distribution is a poster child cloud service example. Not all services will easily fit a cloud model. Many other services that have fit the model (mainly using mapreduce or like) are batch processing based and more about massaging massive amounts of data than interactive end-user services.
- Somewhat simplified, if your service can fit around a key-value store (even a sophisticated one like MongoDB), then it's a candidate for a cloud architecture.
- There are plenty of providers of bits and pieces to do things like server monitoring, cost analysis, and automated/manual server provisioning. In fact, I'm getting into this business myself...

A 'cloud' service is not a hosting service - it's a way to build things, a black-box mindset. There may be a well-defined point of contact (perhaps found via DNS), but beyond that everything is dynamic. The initial contact can redirect, either explicitly or implicitly. It's not like a 'hosting' service where you click a button and get a Joomla host. But it might be a viable way to implement such a hosting service.

Re:Why The Cloud?

[Anonymous Coward]

I kind of liked the first version better.

Re:Why The Cloud?

[fusiongyro]

If you do the math for full utilization of an EC2 instance, or any other cloud offering, you'll see you're paying about 10x what the same would cost with a dedicated VPS or managed host. You only pay for what you use, but their definition of utilization is designed to make it hard to estimate how much you actually will use (do you usually keep track of the quantity of GET and POST requests, as well as the bandwidth, for things you build?)

My problem with the cloud is much like my problem with health care reform. It wasn't health care reform at all, it was health insurance reform. The cloud isn't scalable computing or scalable networking, it's scalable billing.

"Bailout" of the Cloud now!

[ninejaguar]

Otherwise, Amazon will become too big to fail.

= 9J =

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Just... wow.

The amount of bullshit dripping from those statements is as awe-inspiring as the scale and completeness of amazons (now second) massive failure in a service who's main selling point is reliability.

 

Outages

[codepunk]

Many .com websites were unnecessarily down for hours since nobody had thought to plan for a outage. I am sure quite a few architecture meetings where held the following day addressing disaster recovery.

Re:Outages

[Overzeetop]

So, in other words, this is exactly what people who use cloud services for mission critical data needed. It's exceptionally hard to learn good lessons from success, but failures are almost guaranteed to teach something. In this case, the community will understand the potential cost of a four-to-six-nines system without a backup. There is always a finite chance of failure.

Still, it was only down for , what - a day? Remember Loma Prieta? WTC collapses? Things happen, and when they do everybody is down for a while. Compared to real disasters, that's pretty good.

Re:Outages

[pla]

Many .com websites were unnecessarily down for hours since nobody had thought to plan for a outage. I am sure quite a few architecture meetings where held the following day addressing disaster recovery.

Y'know, call me crazy, but I didn't even notice the outage.

I mean, yeah, I read about it on a number of sites (all still up and runing just fine), but honestly can't say I tried to visit even a single site actually unavailable because of the downtime.

I dunno, perhaps this mostly affected ad hosts and I didn't notice because I already block them?

Re:Outages

[Thing 1]

Y'know, call me crazy, but I didn't even notice the outage.

I noticed it: Pricewatch was down, and I wanted more memory in my laptop.

Re:Outages

[Anonymous Coward]

Many .com websites were unnecessarily down for hours since nobody had thought to plan for a outage. I am sure quite a few architecture meetings where held the following day addressing disaster recovery.

Y'know, call me crazy, but I didn't even notice the outage.

I mean, yeah, I read about it on a number of sites (all still up and runing just fine), but honestly can't say I tried to visit even a single site actually unavailable because of the downtime.

I dunno, perhaps this mostly affected ad hosts and I didn't notice because I already block them?

I noticed it. Reddit was down, and I wanted to make fun of religious people

Re:Outages

[Steeltoe]

Science can explain religion; not vice versa.

Too bad science can't prove religion, and no, true science can never explain the unexplainable, that's just a dishonest fantasy of pseudoscientists trying to frame all of reality into their own narrow little worldview. It doesn't even matter if some superstitions are true or not or in what degree, because it's just a question of having the courage to keep an open mind about it, that's all. If you do, you could become the next Newton, Einstein, or something great, instead of all those who can only keep one thought in their mind at the same time, gets nervous at ambiguity and paradoxes, and then frantically try to follow the mainstream.

Btw, someone mentioned Wikileaks. Where are they now that Amazon, Visa and Mastercard have banned them? Amazon may be many things, but democracy or freedom doesn't enter into any art of the equation.

Re:Outages

[Thing 1]

I'm not sure what you're trying to say about my signature. To clarify my position: science can explain what happens in one's brain when one experiences religion. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, tend not to lead to E=MC2 [1]; they're an approximation of logic just like emotions are. Emotions help us to survive, whereas religion helps others to control us (versus spirituality, which is something personal). I'm already something great, and tend not to follow the mainstream (although I still breathe oxygen!).

[1] -- In fact, they generally lead to "infidel must die!"

SPF

[ktappe]

Wait....we should be glad we have a single point of failure on the internet because why?!?

Re:SPF

[jd]

Apparently, because having just one party and no elections makes a democracy. And in later news, why Rupert Murdoch tapping everyone's phones is good for privacy.

Re:SPF

[The End Of Days]

How exactly is this a single point of failure? It's not like there are magically no other ways to put things on the Internet.

And to address my sibling post - this is the purest, most direct form of democracy there is. You vote by using the service, or using some other service, or nothing at all, or many, many other configurations, some of which haven't even been invented yet.

I'm actually rather amazed at the lack of critical thinking skills. I know it's a popular Slashdot meme to say things are going downhill, and I am well aware of the curious technophobic streak that runs through a lot of the people here... but to what end? Is it just for the sheer joy (if that's the word) of shitting on things?

Re:SPF

[FoolishOwl]

I know it's a popular Slashdot meme to say things are going downhill, and I am well aware of the curious technophobic streak that runs through a lot of the people here... but to what end?

This has been really bugging me. I started following Slashdot specifically to keep current on trends in IT. Again and again, I see not just recent innovations, but well-established trends derided as unworkable fad ideas. I was already used to the derision of cloud computing when I had an interview at a company that had been doing "software as a service" for over ten years.

Why? My guess is that it has to do with the pattern I've seen of IT grognards who were hired to set up a new system, and remain in place, watching over that system. They're often highly skilled in the techniques that were current when they set up the system, but they haven't updated their skills; new techniques come to them as suggestions to scrap everything and rebuild the system on new principles, and they become used to arguing against the use of new techniques, at emphasizing the disadvantages and dismissing the advantages. They've fallen into a trap.

There's a line from Nietzche, about how the saddest moment in a person's life is when they stop trying to prove what they can do.

Re:SPF

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, this is more true than you think. I've been reading Slashdot for many years, and the sheer number of comments I've read that boil down to "Gimme a job watching servers, away from any people, and let me write obfuscated code that only I know so they can't get rid of me" is IMO pathetic.

When you stop growing, you have failed at life.

Amazon was down?

[Anonymous Coward]

In only knew Amazon was down because I read it here. Didn't run into any site which was down due to Amazon.

Short Memories

[Anonymous Coward]

"which is one of true democracy" - They quickly forgot their take down of WikiLeaks. Part of democracy is free speech to remind the people of the governments failures. Putting all your eggs in one basket never ends well, we should be scared not grateful.

Re:Short Memories

[jd]

One group taking down WikiLeaks doesn't really matter when it comes to democracy. Indeed, since choice is a part of democracy, one group is perfectly entitled to censor what they like, since one group is utterly insignificant. Indeed, that is how you identify democracies.

The Internet is not democratic and hasn't been since deregulation. The Internet is a federation of dictatorships. You have no choices. If you live in an area where X runs the backbone, ALL ISPs without exception are mere window-dressing over X. They can't provide anything X doesn't pipe, they can't charge less than X charges them, they can't give you freedoms or rights X doesn't grant you. To claim you can choose another provider is like saying you can choose to buy Fords in different shades of absolute black. If you believe in such illusions and phantoms, I've a Golden Gate bridge you can buy.

All we have here is an extension of that. Amazon has pwned the data centers, so choice has been eliminated. That's not democracy, that's dictatorship that's telling you it's democracy. It's as close to real democracy as Saddam Hussein's elections or the Tea Party.

Re:Short Memories

[makomk]

one group is perfectly entitled to censor what they like

They're entitled to, yes, but that doesn't mean that doing so is good for democracy and it certainly doesn't mean we shouldn't scoff and laugh when they're described as "true democracy". Someone needs to be willing to stand up and provide a platform for information that embarrasses the Government; if all the hosting companies and Internet backbone providers and newspapers and publishers and distributors were to refuse to publish it, why, we wouldn't have a democracy anymore at all.

The best way to stop this seems to be to call out companies for their cowardice as it happens, even if they're only one small company amongst many. If it starts seeming like the best option, others will inevitably follow, until you reach the point where it's too late to do anything.

Re:Short Memories

[jd]

I agree with you in that it isn't good for democracy and that such a platform should be provided. The mere fact that one company could have the power to effectively eliminate all such platforms is, however, proof that what we have is most certainly not democracy than that claims that a single entity can ever constitute democracy are highly suspect at best, propoganda at worst. Far from scoffing, I take it as a dangerous sign that the media (who are ethically obliged to provide accurate, honest information) have lost their marbles and that Joe Public has ceased to comprehend what freedom and democracy even mean. The words are over-used and are abused to the point where they have become meaningless noise. Far from laughing, I consider that to be dangerous to the extreme. When words mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean (Lewis Carolls' Humpty Dumpty), with no meaning or substance of their own, abuse becomes inevitable and rational, democratic societies become impossible.

Calling companies out is about all anyone can do, but let's face it. We do NOT meet Plato's requirements for functional democracy, we meet Plato's requirements for dictatorship-dressed-as-democracy. And in such a world, populist speakers will ALWAYS trump rational speakers. Plato recognized that danger and saw it with his own eyes with the ruinous wars that the people were talked into fighting because they were ignorant and let others think for them.

For that reason, calling companies out will have minimal benefit. Companies are foerever being called out on charges of corruption, cowardice, or whatever. If it made any real impact, Halliburton and BP would no longer exist. Neither would AT&T. In fact, I'm trying hard to think of a major company out there that WOULD exist. They're all guilty and the Invisible Hand has served only to hand them "get out of jail free" cards.

Re:Short Memories

[blackraven14250]

They only have get out of jail free cards because the people pick their representatives, and they pick corruption and incompetence. I don't see fault with the system, but with the people participating in the system.

Slightly more... but yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that the major difference to traditional outsourced hosting is what you mentioned but didn't emphasis... The "scalable" part. If you normally spend X amount of resources (CPU time, memory, whatever) and might get a peak of 50X resources at some point, traditionally you would either constantly pay for a lot of resources that you didn't need for most of the time, or your service would crash during the peak. Cloud offers a lot more flexibility as you can pay based on what you use, not based on what you estimate you might need. Pretty useful for some things, though certainly overhyped (and because of the hype, some have reacted with the "It's useless!" attitude, which is just as wrong).

Disadvantages are pretty obvious: Your data is at the hands of a third party.

Democracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy

Eh? And here I thought Amazon was a company trying to make money by selling goods and services.

Re:Democracy?

[hedwards]

And what could be more democratic than selling goods for compensation? Isn't that generally how democracy works? You pay them your vote for them to give you whatever you want. And in modern times, you pay their campaign a lot of money and get to dump your toxic waste wherever you like.

re: "Design for failure"

[Goose In Orbit]

Well done Amazon - you succeeded in failing

One negative...

[RyanFenton]

When there's a 'service' you'd like to block (such as adverts), amazon hosting can make it rather difficult to consistently block them using an IP blacklist, without also blocking potentially useful things too.

Essentially though, they're just packaging the benefits of an economy of scale - things get cheaper the more you focus on larger supply, and thus they can make the most profits and cut off the most competition by scaling up so much with cheap prices. It's part of how companies from WalMart and Google compete so well.

Economies of scale are also one part of why markets inherently fail over time - competition almost always favors those who scale up best, who can then leverage that power over competitors, preventing them from growing to the same extent, and breaking any meaning to the freedom of the market. At that point, competition becomes defined by who can serve WalMart's interest best.

Ryan Fenton

Re:One negative...

[toetagger]

This is what patents were and are supposed to solve! The problem today is not the "economy of scale" + "first mover advantage" = "win forever" but the "I see your 1 patent, and up you with my 1000 patents" threats to new companies. Even if you do have a neat idea and manage to get a patent for it, odds are you'll be sued for some patent infringement by either one of the big players who's lunch you try to eat, or by a patent troll that likes your lunch better than any other.

Re:One negative...

[Anonymous Coward]

Economies of scale didn't help GM.

+1 for interesting

[amanicdroid]

I never have my mod points when wanted.

Where have I heard this before...

[girlintraining]

Microsoft: We're sorry our product broke and a lot of people weren't able to get online. Slashdot: BURN THE HERETIC! Amazon: We're sorry our product broke and a lot of people weren't able to get online. Slashdot: It's okay. Here, have a cookie.

Re:Where have I heard this before...

[cecom]

One of them is a monopoly in a couple of important areas, and using that monopoly to muscle itself via brute force in nearly every single aspect of computing (gaming, mobile, cloud, etc) - guess which one?
Microsoft can no longer be judged solely on technical grounds (where fortunately they do suck).

Re:Where have I heard this before...

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft can no longer be judged solely on technical grounds (where fortunately they do suck).

You must be living in a parallel universe, because Windows 7, Office and the XBox 360 definitely do not suck.

Re:Where have I heard this before...

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon, right? They have more near-monopolies in more areas, if I remember correctly.

Re:Where have I heard this before...

[Anonymous Coward]

you dont know what a monopoly means. if amazon disappeared tomorrow, nothing awful would happen. there are many other online stores, cloud providers, etc. think what would happen if microsoft disappeared? they have got you by the ballz, dude, but you are too clueless to realize it.

Re:Where have I heard this before...

[Anonymous Coward]

?

Back to your own universe dude.

Re:Where have I heard this before...

[VortexCortex]

Microsoft: We're sorry our product broke and a lot of people weren't able to get online. Slashdot: BURN THE HERETIC! Amazon: We're sorry our product broke and a lot of people weren't able to get online. Slashdot: It's okay. Here, have a cookie.

Where have I heard this before:
"Our customers depend on our product line, but refuse to pay even more money to upgrade from XP to MS OS de jour" -- Fine, delay the security updates, the more viruses and downtime XP users suffer, the more incentive they'll have to upgrade... Why not move Office to the Cloud?

"Our customers depend on our media and information services, but refuse to pay even more money to access the premium entertainment media since our generic Internet service provides adequate entertainment" -- Fine, throttle and drop connections, the more unreliability and service downtime Internet users suffer, the more incentive they'll have to purchase our dedicated media solutions... Why not force Internet media companies to co-locate to extract money from both ends of our pipes?

"Our customers depend on our service, but refuse to pay even more money to upgrade from adequate uptime to 'Amazon Fail Proof' Services" -- Fine, gork some servers for a few hours, the more unavailability and downtime lower tier users suffer, the more incentive they'll have to upgrade... Just don't let the outage last long enough to devalue us too much though...

Oh, the cloud, isn't it wonderful? -- Whatever tier you are paying to access is almost adequate enough for the uptime & service you expect or require... Totally gives the saying, "The Sky is The Limit!", a whole new meaning, eh?

Re:Where have I heard this before...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, wow, I didn't realize that. It's almost as if slashdot were multiple people with different opinions instead of one person.

True democracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon, does the word "democracy" mean anything anymore, or is it just decoration? The Amazon situation has nothing whatever to do with democracy, one way or another. It may have a great deal to do with the market, but as mainland China has demonstrated, you can have a highly competitive market without democracy. It's nice when they go together, but one does not necessarily entail the other.

Trapped on a Bus

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi slashdot. I'm currently on a bus with wifi access and a busted DNS server. The IP address for slashdot is cached on my PC, so I am able to access here and post, but can't get anywhere else. Can somebody please post the IP address of an IP address lookup website so that I can access the rest of the internet. Thanks!

Re:Trapped on a Bus

[Anonymous Coward]

google dns is 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (if you don't mind them knowing that you're looking at she-male porn).

Re:Trapped on a Bus

[Anonymous Coward]

He and his wife say omg thank you...

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

"'Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy"

I'm sure Wikileaks would disagree.

Made it Through Pretty Much Unscathed

[ShipIt]

Totally concur with others pointing out Amazon offers redundancy if you choose to use it.

We had webservers, database (master/slave,) and other services split across usa-east and usa-west.

When usa-east started showing problems, we:
*) Took the usa-east webservers out of round robin DNS (ttl 1hr)
*) Verified the slave (in usa-west) was up to date, shut down the master (usa-east,) and converted the slave to master.
*) Updated all webservers to point to the new master.
*) Cranked up new usa-west webservers / updated round robin DNS

I believe Amazon offers mechanisms to do this automatically or we could just always write our own failover scripts, but this is the tradeoff me made. We were willing to trade some service degradation by switching over manually in exchange for avoiding the pitfalls of false-positive detection. Very much an application specific tradeoff, not for everyone, but it worked for what we are doing.

The key was to avoid putting all eggs in the usa-east basket and splitting up across usa-west, even though we incur additional bandwidth fees, ie master/slave replication transfer is full fee between regions.

We were never concerned about cascading failures effecting multiple availability zones in a give region nor did it matter for us - our redundancy requirement was geographical diversity, not partitions within a datacenter. We were thinking natural disaster, but the architecture covered us in this case as well.

The coolest thing to me is just how quickly we were able to shuffle around these resources to avoid a problem area - a couple of hours. There's no way we could have done it so quickly with what we had before - a combination of our own colocated servers and VPS.

Re:Made it Through Pretty Much Unscathed

[codepunk]

Nail hit head, you are correct the key to staying running is planning for failure. Anyone that experienced a multi hour outage obviously had not thought things through.

Didn't even notice

[X.25]

There is a whole world out there who didn't even notice Amazon EC2 outage (me included).

Just sayin'.

lesson learnt

[Anonymous Coward]

I was directly affected by this outage. Once i discovered that the issue was at amazon and not at application- i restored from a previous snapshot, synced my application code, and associated my IP to a new instance in a functioning zone.

Total downtime for me was probably just under an hour. And that's including my debugging time.

Overall it wasn't the end of the world for me and i did discover I should make my redundancy setup run more frequently.

Sure i lost a few sales, but in a way i look at this as an example of why I should be better prepared for such an occurrence.

This still isnt as bad a when IBM pulled the wrong drives out of my server and wiped them.

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this modded -1?

true democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

as they showed in the wikileaks issue.

The dance

[skrimp]

It's seems like all this article and comments are doing is dancing around the real issue. Amazon provides a pretty good service, but it's being attacked. It's like calling a car unreliable when thieves have stolen the wheels. I'm becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of effort being made to identify the attacker(s) and take appropriate action(s) against them.

#missioncritical

[Anonymous Coward]

Now this is a slightly concerning victim of cloud downtime:
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=65649&tstart=0

"We are a monitoring company and are monitoring hundreds of cardiac patients at home.
We were unable to see their ECG signals since 21st of April"

And how much of the net, really ?

[unity100]

rackspace.com, softlayer.com, hetzner.de -> most of the web is housed on big providers like these. personal, organization, and small businesses are alike. these providers' main business is renting racks and servers, which are then used by hosts to rent to end customers.

i dont know where does this 'how much of the net relies on amazon became clear' bullshit comes from. are there any statistics to show for it ? or, are people unaware of what's going on outside their little world window of expertise, so that they think that amazon cloud, for some reason, has become the 'backbone' of internet ?

really. where are the statistics ? all i see, some random guy gives away some pdf by hosting it through amazon's cloud, and then proceeds to claim that 'net' became too reliant on, amazon ...

really ....

Life of our patients is at stake - I am desperatel

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is a fake.. Would anyone be stupid enough to do this without redudancy?

I know I'm too naive and want to believe in people having common sense...

Amazon? Democracy? What a crock!

[austinhook]

"Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy"

Isn't Amazon one of those nasty companies that banned Wikileaks from their servers? Qaddafi could explain democracy this way, but who else would be so innocent?

It shows a large opportunity it is for Apple

[tyrione]

Let's just see how they expand their cloud services and see if it wants to eat at Amazon's other ventures.

Re:It shows a large opportunity it is for Apple

[VortexCortex]

Let's just see how they expand their cloud services and see if it wants to eat at Amazon's other ventures.

Fanboi much?
Apple has made the decision, fairly quietly, that they are no longer going to sell Xserve server products past Jan 2011.

FAQs for the Xserve End Of Life
Q: Where can I see what Apple has announced about Xserve?

A: The official announcement is here: http://www.apple.com/xserve/resources.html

Guess what? That Apple URL -- gone.

Q: What does this mean for the operating system software, Mac OS X Server? Will there be an upgrade for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion for Xserve?

A: Apple has made no announcement about its plans for Mac OS X Server software.

Q: What are the alternatives sources of hardware?

A: At the time of this post, there are no other suppliers of rack mounted hardware than can run Mac OS X Server.

Q: Can I run OS X Server in a virtual machine on other hardware?

A: At the time of this post, no. The license for OS X Server prohibits installation on hardware from any manufacturer except Apple.

Q: What are the alternatives for an organization dependent on Xserve?

A: You must plan to migrate to another hardware platform, either Apple’s (Mac Pro or Mac Mini) or transition to servers running Windows or Linux.

Maybe you're right, maybe Apple is so bloody cunning that they End of Life'd their server line to ensure that Apple is the only one who can use Apple software / hardware to provide Apple cloud services...

In any event, I won't be buying into their mono-culture with silent death hanging over my head. Giving controll of both the hardware and the software your business can run on seems sort of... well... dangerous. Just sayin'

Sure, true democrocy

[Anonymous Coward]

"Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy, access to the means of distribution, and rapid evolution."

That's what Wikileaks thought.

Phillip.

I for one welcome our new EC2 Overlord!

[jvillain]

Slashdot didn't go down so I didn't know about it until some one posted a story. It's not the big things like this that worry me about being in the cloud. It is the small things you are never going to know about until it is to late that worry me.

WikiLeaks

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, didn't Amazon shutter WikiLeaks after they got wind of some random senator being against their hosting of the site? 'Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy, access to the means of distribution, and rapid evolution' seems just slightly off. Except the rapid evolution part, since IIRC it took them only one day to fulfill the senator's wish.

No moar cheezburgerz

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the sites was cheezburger.com, of LOLCats fame. Now you have my attention, Amazon.

"If da lolcats are not safes, den nobuddy iz safes."

http://cheezburger.com/View/4686876160

(cite where Cheezburger CEO discusses the Great Cheezburger Calamity of 2011)
http://viodi.com/2011/04/22/amazons-ec2-outage-proves-cloud-failure-recovery-is-a-myth/

Re:Amazon? Democracy? What a crock!

[Ash-Fox]

Isn't Amazon one of those nasty companies that banned Wikileaks from their servers?

I don't remember anything 'nasty' about it, so no. I think the opposite is true, attempting to hide behind companies who have no interest in being involved with the mess, putting all their customers at risk. Pretty sure the nastiness was from Wikileaks.

Just a friendly reminder.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/dec/11/wikileaks-amazon-denial-democracy-lieberman

Total BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Quoting: 'Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy, access to the means of distribution, and rapid evolution.'"

This is total bull shit. The spirit of the Internet is to be free and open. Take a good look at Amazon's patent chest and then say they are the personification of the spirit of the Internet. They're all about lock in and control.

Actually this crash of their systems shows what lier they are about their products. It just didn't hold up like they said it would now did it.

Catastrophic failure is good?

[Rambo Tribble]

These guys need to spin for TEPCO.

The cloud?

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why I will never rely entirely upon the cloud. Think this will be the only time something like this will happen?

Vulnerability in the Cloud

[rhalstead]

but I think what people are missing is how vulnerable using the cloud makes us, not how much we depend on Amazon.. When our own systems go down, they affect us. When just one supplier in the cloud goes down it affects many.and can have wide reaching consequences. There are many positive aspects to cloud computing, but we tend to ignore its shortcomings in our enthusiasm.

Re:Amazon? Democracy? What a crock!

[austinhook]

Using what is supposed to be a kind of utility, a cloud service, does not qualify as "trying to hide behind", or else that applies to everyone else who uses it, nor does it mean that Amazon was involved in the mess any more than a phone company is, when they carry whatever communications, nor does it mean that it puts any of Amazon's customers at risk. An army of straw men will not make a point more valid. On the contrary, it is an implied threat against any of Amazon's customers, that if they are not politically popular the same fate may befall them too. It was an act of political censorship, pure and simple, and serves notice that anyone else that does not toe the establishment line will have their toes stepped upon. What gutless wonders are these Amazon folks, in a world where people are dying every day to protest censorship.