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Amazon EC2 Failure Post-Mortem
CPE1704TKS tips news that Amazon has provided a post-mortem on why EC2 failed. Quoting:
"At 12:47 AM PDT on April 21st, a network change was performed as part of our normal AWS scaling activities in a single Availability Zone in the US East Region. The configuration change was to upgrade the capacity of the primary network. During the change, one of the standard steps is to shift traffic off of one of the redundant routers in the primary EBS network to allow the upgrade to happen. The traffic shift was executed incorrectly and rather than routing the traffic to the other router on the primary network, the traffic was routed onto the lower capacity redundant EBS network. For a portion of the EBS cluster in the affected Availability Zone, this meant that they did not have a functioning primary or secondary network because traffic was purposely shifted away from the primary network and the secondary network couldn't handle the traffic level it was receiving."
Instead of closing off one lane of highway for construction, they closed off all lanes and forced highway traffic to go through town. The roads in town weren't able to handle all the cars. Massive back-ups ensued.
..and according to http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/04/29/0254215/Amazon-EC2-Crash-Caused-Data-Loss, the DPW mistakenly pushed some of the cars into the old abandoned quarry.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Instead of the usual commuter rail line, we've had to do some maintenance causing us to provide a single Yugo as transport for the NY morning rush.
After packing 25 angry commuters into the Yugo we left a few hundred thousand stranded on the platform, ping-ponging between the parking lot and home, completely confused how they would get to work.
In addition to that, unfortunately the Yugo couldn't handle the added weight of the passengers and the leaf springs shattered all over the ground. So the 25 passengers we initially planned for were left trapped, to die, inside of the disabled Yugo. They all starved in the days it took us to realize the Yugo never left the station parking lot.
We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused and have upgraded to AAA Gold status to prevent any further future disruptions. This will ensure that at least 25 people will actually reach their destinations should this occur again, though they may need to ride on a flat-bed to get there.
Dear AWS Customer,
Starting at 12:47AM PDT on April 21st, there was a service disruption (for a period of a few hours up to a few days) for Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS that primarily involved a subset of the Amazon Elastic Block Store (âoeEBSâ) volumes in a single Availability Zone within our US East Region. You can read our detailed summary of the event here:
http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648
Weâ(TM)ve identified that you had an attached EBS volume or a running RDS database instance in the affected Availability Zone at the time of the disruption. Regardless of whether your resources and application were impacted, we are going to provide a 10 day credit (for the
period 4/18-4/27) equal to 100% of your usage of EBS Volumes, EC2 Instances and RDS database instances that were running in the affected Availability Zone. This credit will be automatically applied to your April bill, and you donâ(TM)t need to do anything to receive it.
You can see your service credit by logging into your AWS Account Activity page after you receive your upcoming billing statement.
Last, but certainly not least, we want to apologize. We know how critical the services we provide are to our customersâ(TM) businesses and we will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services.
Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team
This message was produced and distributed by Amazon Web Services, LLC, 410 Terry Avenue
North, Seattle, Washington 98109-5210
Kriston
I commend Amazon for providing us with this information. Yes, bad things happened, and data is gone forever. Amazon knows what happened and why, and I'm sure they will implement controls to prevent this again. I doubt we'll hear as much from Sony, though.