AWS Outage

Contributed by Santo on 27 Apr 2011

• 
• Tweet
• Get in Touch

The recent Amazon Web Services outage was one of the most severe ones. It lasted for upwards of 3 days from some companies/applications that were delivering on top of the same.

Some of the prominent services / applications partially or fully affected by it were

• Quora (www.quora.com)
• Reddit (www.reddit.com)
• Heroku (www.heroku.com)

Surprisingly services like Netflix (www.netflix.com) which are heavily dependent on AWS saw low or no reported outage.

Heroku(check http://status.heroku.com/incident/151)  maintained a great status page for this incident and has provided a lot of insights on both how the problems faced and how they tackled it. Heroku’s escalation procedures and decision matrix are absolutely exemplary.

Some observations

• AWS still remains one of the most robust Cloud Services providers. Their last critical outage was in June 2008.
• Services like EC2 where restored in few hours.
• Organisations which choose “Multi-Region Redundancy” over “Multi-Zone Availibility”  e.g. NetFlix did not face any issues
• Dependence on specific AWS services like EBS caused a longer outage from some providers.
• Amazon needs to be more transperant about the internal architecture it is using to provide its services to shore up consumer confidence.
• Having your own organisational cloud DR (Disaster Recovery) plan in place is absolutely necessary.
• If you are looking at porting a Critical application/service to the cloud then a “Multi” Cloud approach would be very prudent.

References

• http://status.heroku.com/incident/151
• http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/2011/04/25/critical-applications-in-the-cloud/

Visit us at Neevtech.com to know more about our offerings.

Tags: aws, cloud computing, EBS, Outage, Quora, Reddit, RightSize