Amazon Forced To Reboot EC2 To Patch Bug In Xen

Bismillah writes AWS is currently emailing EC2 customers that it will need to reboot their instances for maintenance over the next few days. The email doesn't explain why the reboots are being done, but it is most likely to patch for the embargoed XSA-108 bug in Xen. ZDNet takes this as a spur to remind everyone that the cloud is not magical. Also at The Register.

Comments

Compared to Azure

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny for me to read that Amazon is notifying its users of an impending reboot.

I've been suffering with Azure for over a year now, and the only thing that's constant is rebooting....

My personal favorite Azure feature, is that SQL Azure randomly drops database connections by design.

Let that sink in for a while. You are actually required to program your application to expect failed database calls.

I've never seen such a horrible platform, or a less reliable database server...

Re:Compared to Azure

[Just Some Guy]

When hosting your app in the cloud, regardless of provider, it is considered best practice to design for failure.

Netflix goes so far as to randomly kill services throughout the day. Their idea is that it's better to find systems that aren't auto-healing correctly by testing recovery during routine operations than to be surprised by it at 3AM. It's successful to the point that you generally don't know that the streaming server you were connected to has been killed and a peer took over for it. That is how you make reliable cloud services.