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Re:Ask HN: Best setups to avoid availability outages on AWS by aeden on Saturday June 30, 2012 @08:06AM (#4181425)
Sending traffic to different zones isn't the challenge, the challenge is deciding where your master data will live. In fact, this has always been one of the biggest challenges of building a fault-tolerant systems. If your master data store lives in one zone then you've got latency issues, but if it lives in multiple zones then you need to find a logical way to shard. You could also replicate across zones and then turn off writes if the zone with the master fails. You could even change masters in that case, but there's risk of data loss there.

Anyhow, sorry I don't have a simple answer - I'm not sure a simple answer exists.

Re:Ask HN: Best setups to avoid availability outages on AWS by rdl on Saturday June 30, 2012 @08:12AM (#4181434)
There would be some value in failing somewhat gracefully even when your database, AZ, etc. is down. Redirect to a site-specific outage message with updates, workarounds, etc. Serving read-only also works, for some applications.

The nice thing is Cloudflare does a lot of this for you for free.

Re:Ask HN: Best setups to avoid availability outages on AWS by gazarsgo on Saturday June 30, 2012 @05:36PM (#4182898)
multi-az in RDS does the replication and automatic failover for you, no sharding necessary.
Re:Ask HN: Best setups to avoid availability outages on AWS by mh- on Sunday July 01, 2012 @01:31AM (#4183951)