Re:Don't blame Amazon for your lack of redundancy
by matellis on Thursday April 21, 2011 @07:50PM
(#2472819)
Our point is it's unfair to blame Amazon 100% when there were viable and affordable ways round this outage. Some of our customers were in US East and had off-site backups, scripted server deployments and were able to get back online pretty quickly.
Re:Don't blame Amazon for your lack of redundancy
by jodrellblank on Friday April 22, 2011 @07:30AM
(#2473761)
How were they able to get back online? Deploying to another AWS site or to another cloud provider? Presumably they didn't own enough servers themselves?
At what point did they make the call that the outage was too serious and they would lose all data since the last backup and start migrating? Had they pre-planned for it, or was it ad-hoc? Will they stay where they are now and use Amazon US East as their failover or migrate back in due course? Or rearchitect to handle this in future?
(thanks, re: name).
Is it just luck that the problem which happened was one they prepared for instead of one they didn't?
Or because the cloud has offered such a good value proposition for cheap and easy scaling with demand.
And anyway, it's unfair to rail on people who "should have had a redundancy plan" when the service they pay money for is one with a redundancy service included in it (availability zones) which has unexpectedly also failed.
Our point stands, for engineers to consider all likely scenarios when building redundancy and not assume anyone – even Amazon – can provide 100.0% uptime.
Your point appears to be "If you don't have 100% uptime then it's all your fault and you should have planned for it you lazy idiot, everyone should blame you. Also you can never have 100% uptime so people should stop blaming Amazon.". Do you have more of a point than that?