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Dark Day In the AWS Cloud: Big Name Sites Go Down
An outage of one company's servers might only affect that company's customers — but when a major data center for Amazon hits kinks, sites that rely on the AWS cloud services all suffer from the downtime. That's what happened today, when several major sites or online services (like Instagram and AirBnB) were knocked temporarily offline, evidently because of problems at an Amazon data center in Northern Virginia. From TechCrunch's coverage of the outage: "The deluge of tweets that accompanied the services’ initial hiccups first started at around 4 p.m. Eastern time, and only increased in intensity as users found they couldn’t share pictures of their food or their meticulously crafted video snippets. Some further poking around on Twitter and beyond revealed that some other services known to rely on AWS — Netflix, IFTTT, Heroku and Airbnb to name a few — have been experiencing similar issues today."
Assuming you mean traditional round-robin A records, the timeout(s) you still have to suffer through would kill your latency.
If your talking about DNS providers (disclaimer, I work for Dyn) with advanced features that detect a failover event occurring and will only serve healthy A records, then that is a different story.
either you don't speak English or you need to take your meds. no offense. so i'll try muddling a reply together for you.
There are many ways to setup remote failover systems. Most of them rely on some type of heartbeat system where there's a "heartbeat message" which they all send each other periodically, and if the current Active goes out of response for too long the others choose one to take over. So it doesn't matter if they're all in one room connected with a single switch, or spread all over the planet.
The real rub for any mechanism is DNS... if the primary server your FQDN points at drops then you might have redundancy but most people won't be able to take advantage of it. With more manual mechanisms (such as telling users "If our primary site goes down, try here instead!") that's not as much of a concern, just a PITA to keep track of.
"cloud" is sold as a *convenient* way to compute, where it's quick to add resources when needed so you can start small and scale up (and down) with demand.
It is *not* generally considered a cheap or particularly reliable solution. So far at least none of the cloud providers are offering five nines--if you want that, you should (for now at least) jbe looking at enterprise/telecom gear.
It depends which data center you're in. PortableApps.com has been hosted at Rackspace for years and we had multiple major outtages due to ongoing power issues in the Dallas data center in 2009. The switch from grid to ups was failing and would take the whole wing of the data center out with every server crashing hard. It would take quite a while to come back up. Then we'd have to wait hours for the Rackspace folks to rebuild our corrupted database (fully managed account on a dedicated server). It happened two weekends in a row in June and one other time if I recall correctly, basically costing us a full day of downtime each time.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc