Comments on: Amazon Web Services Gets Another Hiccup

By: Parascale raises $11.37M to help companies control their cloud storage destiny » VentureBeat

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:37:57 +0000

[...] to “control its destiny,” Krishnan says, which may be particularly tempting in light of Amazon’s occasional outages. Companies like PolyServe (now owned by Hewlett Packard) and Ibrix provide similar services, but [...]

By: Google finally gets its head up in the (compute) clouds — Online Observations

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:54:05 +0000

[...] having said that, it is to be seen how ‘available’ the platform actually remains. Amazon has been having a bad time with the uptime of their services. Ok, so what’s new and different about the Google App [...]

By: Laurent’s blog » Blog Archive » Around the web this week

Laurent’s blog » Blog Archive » Around the web this week — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:41:04 +0000

[...] Amazon EC2 outage last monday (aws forum, explaination from amazon, techcrunch), Facebook was plagued by an API bug that broke some of the 3rd party applications (bug report, [...]

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:15:22 +0000

Will these reliability issues give more traction to AppEngine?

Matt / Kusiri

By: クラウドコンピューティング | My fine Asian skin glows - by Ryo Sode

クラウドコンピューティング | My fine Asian skin glows - by Ryo Sode — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 01:26:52 +0000

[...] グリッドマネージメント層がオチると Cloud 全体が使用不可能になります。Amazon EC2 は先日オチたばかり。こうなってしまうと、ホスティング会社に一本電話いれてサーバーリブートすれば良しという単純な問題ではないので運営とフェイルセーフ機能だけはしっかりして欲しいですね。 [...]

By: Vidar Hokstad

Vidar Hokstad — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:19:27 +0000

I’m still amazed that people tie their business so closely to EC2. Especially when it’s so expensive compared to the alternatives, and you can achieve the elasticity by being set up to use EC2 if/when you ever get that massive, sudden surge that’s big enough to make EC2 cost effective.

Last time I looked at prices, you’d need to use your instances on average 6 hours or less a day for EC2 to be able to compete with equivalent capacity at a managed hosting facility. Even less if you have enough servers to justify managing your own colo. If you use EC2 for your basic capacity, you’re paying 2-4 times more than you need just in case of a spike or sudden growth that you could still handle with EC2 if you hosted your main setup somewhere cheaper. Doesn’t make any sense to me.

Dependence on EC2 is a big red flag - it shows people haven’t looked closely at the cost.

By: Ewaste

Ewaste — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 06:19:50 +0000

wow what an uproar ove inablity to shop!

By: Thorsten - CTO RightScale

Thorsten - CTO RightScale — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:07:12 +0000

FYI, the Amazon folks just posted a pretty detailed analysis of what happens. See http://developer.amazonwebserv.....p;start=75
It did affect multiple availability zones independently. How humiliating. I’ll repeat what I’ve said elsewhere: We still hear comments about the lack of an SLA. All I can say is that for me the best SLA is a track record and demonstrated commitment and ability to fix issues promptly and to eradicate root causes. So Amazon has done a very good job at that.
Now we just want this event not to repeat…

By: Hurry, The Cloud Computing Platform Opportunity is Perishable! « SmoothSpan Blog

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 03:40:58 +0000

[...] to feel. Amazon is now experiencing significant growth and scaling pains for the service. EC2 just went down for about an hour for many [...]

By: DevlinD

DevlinD — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 02:02:15 +0000

Whatever, it’s still better than what companies who use to run all this stuff internally are used to. It used to be they had to suffer the downtime (it is inevitable…even if God was your IT guy), lose the revenue, AND pay for the tech team to put it back up.

By: ;)

;) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:21:11 +0000

Brendan. I agree.

The benefit of seperate “zones” is that you run your main app/database in “zone 1″ and have a live backup app/database in “zone 2″ (your backup zone)

If “zone 1″ goes down, you simple swap to “zone 2″.

However this morning, more than one zone went down which pulled down customers main app/database and their backup ones..

By: Brendan Wovchko

Brendan Wovchko — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:15:18 +0000

Thanks for the great article! A quick clarification in Amazon’s defense, though.

I wanted to point out that although this post is correct, EC2 customers would not have experienced complete failure if they were properly utilizing the tools which Amazon makes available to ensure a fail-safe hosting setup.

As of a couple weeks ago, Amazon began allowing their EC2 customers to select the zone in which their servers are located. In Amazon’s vernacular, the word “zone” is interchangeable with “physical location”.

There is a great article on how to achieve fault tolerant hosting using AWS at the link below…
http://blog.rightscale.com/200.....ity-zones/

If you setup your cloud computing the right way it’s very possible to achieve nearly 100% reliable hosting. In my opinion, that is why Amazon doesn’t provide an SLA. They count it the responsibility of the customer to be well-versed enough in networking to know how to protect themselves.

In my opinion, AWS is not a plug-and-play solution for a company which is casual about it’s hosting. I think AWS makes that pretty clear by calling their product Elastic Computing Cloud and not something a little less academic.

By: John Willis

John Willis — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:57:43 +0000

IBM Blue Cloud is vaporware …

http://www.johnmwillis.com/clo.....oud-stuff/

By: ;)

;) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:10:43 +0000

It worries me that more than one zone went down at the same time.

This really worries me as I thought “zones” was the answer to all our “one down and we’re all down” worries.

By: softornot

softornot — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:29:11 +0000

SoftOtNot.com gets most of its visitors in the middle of the night. They would have screwed me big time … sort of

By: Adriana

Adriana — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:28:13 +0000

I was trying to purchase a gift for a friend . . . to no avail. So, when will it be up and running again?

By: TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Amazon Web Servicesがまたダウン

TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Amazon Web Servicesがまたダウン — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:06:28 +0000

[...] [原文へ] [...]

By: Jorge Oliveira

Jorge Oliveira — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:44:58 +0000

“It is great for hosting high volume reliable web sites. ”
“For me the best SLA is track record and demonstrated commitment and ability to fix issues promptly and to eradicate root causes. So far Amazon has done a very good job at that.”

Couldn’t agree more.

By: Thorsten

Thorsten — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:34:49 +0000

@CBass: EC2 was designed as completely general compute utility. It is great for hosting high volume reliable web sites. We have many dozens of customers running web sites on EC2 and the reliability despite the few publicized outages has been much better than anything I’ve seen in 8+ years of managing datacenters worldwide. The feature set is now also starting to exceed what’s available in most colo facilities. Regarding SLA, I’ve never seen an SLA having a damages clause that comes even within orders of magnitude of the lost business (unless your business is really small). For me the best SLA is track record and demonstrated commitment and ability to fix issues promptly and to eradicate root causes. So far Amazon has done a very good job at that.

@Jake: Up to now Amazon has always posted a follow up to issues explaining what happened. It’s just too early for them to get through all the internal root cause analysis to post it. In the past they have posted post-mortems within a day.

What we can tell so far is that what happened is a network issue disrupting connectivity to the outside world. No servers were terminated due to this and internal connectivity seems to have been fine. Also, more than one failure zone was affected, which is not good. I’m looking forward to hearing the explanation of what happened from Amazon and how they’re going to prevent recurrence…

By: JeromeG

JeromeG — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:16:07 +0000

The other question here is: will we still use EC2 and the rest of the AWS offering? Yes we do. The platform itself is compelling for us to build an offering that a traditional setting like a colo or a DC can’t offer (elasticity) in a very quick and timely manner, so we’re sticking to it. Now if Google or others offer something similar, then we will harness those services as well to complement existing AWS offerings.

By: JeromeG

JeromeG — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:10:26 +0000

We have a big number of EC2 and S3 operations and majority of them were affected - of course we did what we have to do: implement our contingency measures and see what we can do during the downtime. It took an hour and a half and 5 minutes after everything went back, we were back in business.

PS. We’re based in the Philippines

By: links for 2008-04-07 « Brent Sordyl’s Blog

links for 2008-04-07 « Brent Sordyl’s Blog — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:37:35 +0000

[...] Amazon Web Services Gets Another Hiccup Amazon’s Web Services experienced another hiccup today. Early this morning, its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) went down for about an hour for at least some customers in the U.S. (tags: aws ec2) [...]

By: Jake

Jake — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:31:19 +0000

We have some sites on Slicehost and some on EC2. It frustrates me that we never get a clear explanation from Amazon. We’re considering moving everything to Slicehost, but it’s always good to keep your stuff spread out (to avoid problems like this).

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:24:32 +0000

” At least this one happened during the middle of the night.”

Good job no-one in Europe uses EC2 then.

By: drew

drew — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:49:23 +0000

our EC2 server went down, we are based in australia