Slashdot Mirror
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."
That's expensive. "Cloud" hosting services cost about 1.5x traditional hosting. When you want multiple locations("regions" in aws) you need to pay for resources in each additional region, then pay another cost to provide that failover. Cloud hosting is great, but it's nothing it does is new or cheaper than hosting 10 years ago.
Website Hosting
No they didn't lie. You can set things up that way-simply set up your servers in multiple data centers(AWS availability zones) and load balance between them. It's foolish to just throw things up in the cloud and think magically I won't ever have to worry about downtime ever again. It's foolish-but a lot of companies act this way.
Somehow cloud hosting is taken as the silver bullet to prevent outages-it isn't. You still have to architect things the way you would normally if you're looking for things like disaster recovery, high availability, etc...etc..
That things like this will happen with a cloud infrastructure are obvious. That the reliability claims made by the cloud providers are fantasy is also obvious. As soon as they start to do "uptime or else" (meaning you get tons of money as downtime compensation), things may be different. but they will not do that. At this time, the only thing you can do is change to a different cloud provider, which will have the same issues. Uptime guarantees without penalties when failed to meet them are worthless.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"nothing it does is new or cheaper than hosting 10 years ago."
Welcome to the wonderful world of marketing. Sell people what they already have for 50% more.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.