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More Uptime Problems For Amazon Cloud

Posted by Soulskill on from the stormy-weather dept.

1sockchuck writes "An Amazon Web Services data center in northern Virginia lost power Friday night during an electrical storm, causing downtime for numerous customers — including Netflix, which uses an architecture designed to route around problems at a single availability zone. The same data center suffered a power outage two weeks ago and had connectivity problems earlier on Friday."

5 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Infrastructure by TubeSteak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We need to invest trillions in roads, water, and electrical infrastructure to keep this country going.
    If you let the basic building blocks of civilization rot, don't be surprised when everything else follows suit.

    --
    [Fuck Beta]
    o0t!
    1. Re:Infrastructure by rubycodez · · Score: 4, Insightful

      war is the basic building block of our particular civilization. if we waste money on your frivolities, how will we afford war & keep war machine shareholder value?

  2. What, you thought "cloud" meant "no outage"? by ebunga · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Cloud computing is nothing more than 1960s timesharing services with modern operating systems. Unless you design for resilience, you're not resilient to problems.

  3. Re:Seems like anything takes down the cloud... by hawguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It seems that recently, anything can take down the cloud, or at least cause a serious disruption for any of the major cloud providers. I wonder how many more of these it takes before the cloud-skeptics start winning the debates with management a lot more often.

    I think it's more because a cloud outage affects thousands of customers, so it has more visibility. When Amazon has problems, the news is reported on Slashdot. When a smaller collocation center has an accidental fire suppression discharge taking hundreds of customers offline, it doesn't get any press coverage at all.

    But the biggest takeaway from this is - never put all of your assets in one region. No matter how much redundancy Amazon builds into a region, a local disaster can still take out the datacenter. That's why they have Availability zones *and* regions. I have some servers in us-east-1a and they weren't affected at all. If they were down, I could bring up my servers in us-west within about an hour. (I could even automate it, but a few hours or even a day of downtime for these servers is no big deal)

  4. Re:Largest non-hurricane related power outage ever by John+Bresnahan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Of course, the network only works if every router in between the data center and the customer has power. In a power outage of this size, it's entirely possible that more than one link is down.