Skip to main content

What happened to Amazon yesterday?

Yesterday was an interesting day for many (I mean many) sites around the world which rely on Amazon servers.

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), an amazing implementation of Cloud Computing had a major network failure yesterday that triggered a re-mirror of all the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes in the North Virginia data centre.

This re-mirror combined with a large number of customers trying to fire up new instances to recover from the network failure caused Amazon to hit a storage capacity problem.

 

image
Basically they didn’t have enough disk space to support the re-mirror and as the thousands upon thousands of customers they have tried to fire up new replacement images the problem compounded.

Amazon is still experiencing these issues and is updating the current status at http://status.aws.amazon.com/rss/EC2.rss and http://status.aws.amazon.com/

Many big sites and their services are still down. Some of them are -

About.me

Quora.com

Reddit.com

StarNews.in

RepositoryHosting.com

Foursquare.com

HootSuite.com

See http://ec2disabled.com for the complete list.

What companies can try in these scenarios?

  1. They should have strict disaster recovery process which can make the system up in not less than 30 minutes
  2. They should try out the actual worst scenarios from their so called hourly (or minutely!) backups and thorough recovery process
  3. As soon as Amazon admitted that they had severe performance issues in the status page, you should start out disaster recovery process, in this case, move everything to a new availability zone to have everything up and running with full data integrity

Do you really believe that Amazon running out of disk space? But those are the details that Amazon published as of now. We may have to wait for full post mortem report.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Your Google Apps Account is Changing

Google is about to make more of its services available to organizations with Google Apps accounts. This is an early adopter phase, and all domains may not get this option to move to the new infrastructure. What this means for you: In addition to the core suite of messaging and collaboration applications, Google Apps users may now access many more Google services with their Google Apps accounts.     Those who are eligible for this early adoption, Google Apps administrator will be presented with the above banner to start with the migration. In your organization, you can transition selected pilot users and admins, or you can start the transition now for all your users. The transition for pilot users can be reverted if necessary. After successful transition, your users will now be able to use other Google popular products like AdSense, AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, Android, Blogger, Finance, Google Desktop, News, Orkut, Reader, Voice, YouTube (Full list here ). Als...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Turn Your Android Phone into a Fully-Automated Superphone

What if your phone automatically went silent when you step into the movie theatre? Texted your significant other when you finished your long commute? Or automatically turned down the volume when a particularly loud friend called? It can; here's how. Android application Tasker gives you total rules-based automation for your Android phone. It's not free, but it offers a free 14-day trial download. Tasker can do nearly anything on your phone. It's mostly limited by your imagination. Here are some up-front ideas about neat automations that come to mind: • Set preferences for each application: Give the Kindle app a longer screen time-out. Make Maps or Foursquare automatically turn on GPS, and have a file browser launch when you trade out SD cards. Have your music and other audio apps lower the volume to 50 percent when you plug in headphones, so you never get a way-too-loud moment. • Time of day automation: Make your phone go into airplane mode overnight, but re-conne...
Post a Comment
Read more

Google Wallet: The Future Innovative Mobile Payments

Earlier few months, Google unveiled future innovative way of payment technology – Google Wallet. Today, Google released its first version of the Android app with Sprint Nexus S 4G phones through an over the air update. Google Wallet is an app that lets you pay for things using your phone, either by tying your credit card or gift or pre-paid cards. It works using an near field communication (NFC) embedded chip and there is no swiping required.   According to Techcrunch , Google Wallet will not work everywhere your credit card will. It won’t work everywhere there’s an NFC-friendly card reader, either. Wallet requires an NFC reader based on a new-ish specification, and only a select bunch of retailers have gotten around to updating. The post also had some great review and walkthrough in real life. This app is now available to Samsung Nexus S owners on Sprint, through PayPass sensors at Radio Shack, Foot Locker, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Sunoco, CVS/pharmacy, etc. retailers. ...
Post a Comment
Read more