News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by aidos on Thursday November 27, 2014 @12:09PM (#8668064)
It's the second time in less than a week that AWS have failed to update their status page during service disruption and then filed it under 'increased error rates'.

Don't get me wrong, I love AWS and use it every day, but it's a little insulting to pretend that things haven't gone wrong when they quite obviously have.

I know Amazon aren't the most transparent company in the world but why even bother having a status page if everyone has to turn to twitter to validate the outage?

Last night while sitting around waiting for cloudfront to come back so I could get on with my work I turned to HN to give me a bit of reading material. My word, sooooo many of the articles linked to on the front page were missing their static assets because of the AWS outage. Would be really interesting to know what percentage of the internet was affected.

Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by Tarang on Thursday November 27, 2014 @12:20PM (#8668111)
Its not the first time. Their status page is not trustworthy. When there was an issue a few weeks ago concerning the HVM? many instances were restarted. Status page showed green as if nothing had happened. They probably change it when its well known.

Its conflicting for a company to show its own status page I suppose. Its in its own interest to get it to be green as much as possible, even if its just for display's sake as a false sense of security.

Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by sillysaurus3 on Thursday November 27, 2014 @12:40PM (#8668182)
Sounds like it's time for one of us to make an AWS status page. I wonder if it'd be possible?
Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by hueving on Thursday November 27, 2014 @02:08PM (#8668477)
Don't host it on AWS. :)

This is actually a hard problem because many of these services are localized using BGP anycasting. So the status checking would have to have probe nodes all over the world.

Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by mnutt on Thursday November 27, 2014 @02:24PM (#8668520)
We learned about this particular outage from health checks we had set up in Pingdom. Somebody like them could expose those checks as a public service, and try to become the go-to place for getting the real status of AWS.
Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by kaeawc on Thursday November 27, 2014 @12:57PM (#8668249)
Seconded
Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by res0nat0r on Thursday November 27, 2014 @01:11PM (#8668301)
At least for EC2 status updates and their color (green i, etc) are only posted if they meet certain thresholds. IE: Greater than $X number of instances are actually offline or unavailable etc.

Possibly many of the outages you happen to be seeing are in reality not that large thus not meeting the threshold to have a post, or major status update.

Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by jon_wu on Thursday November 27, 2014 @01:10PM (#8668297)
We started using Google Cloud Storage when it first came out so that user uploads would be closer to them (in theory) due to GCS' distributed design. They seem to have periods of 15-90 minutes every few months where they start timing out or giving us huge errors and often times we don't even hear about it either. They don't have a status page any only announce via email list - usually way after we've been scrambling.

Anybody else have a bad experience with Google Cloud Storage? I'm wondering if we're better off going with S3. Most users on my site are uploading photos, so when that dies, everything is down.

Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by dmytton on Thursday November 27, 2014 @04:13PM (#8668749)
The Google Cloud status page is at https://status.cloud.google.com/
Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by jpatokal on Thursday November 27, 2014 @09:46PM (#8669462)
And there's a history page too, listing two outages for Cloud Storage:

https://status.cloud.google.com/summary

Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by oneeyedpigeon on Thursday November 27, 2014 @12:25PM (#8668123)
Are there independent services that monitor a range of hosting providers, cdn, etc. and keep a history that can be used for reference? I'm thinking someone like pingdom could do this.
Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by lclarkmichalek on Thursday November 27, 2014 @12:29PM (#8668136)
https://cloudharmony.com/ does to some extent, though it's not exactly what your talking about
Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by ehm_may on Thursday November 27, 2014 @05:04PM (#8668898)
Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by RRWagner on Thursday November 27, 2014 @12:48PM (#8668214)
Grammatical aside: I've noticed more usage of "company x are…" I never really went for "the data are/show/etc.", despite the learned Latin explanation. To me, "the data" indicates the same group as "the information" and is still singular. A company acting as an entity is singular. I hope the "company are" trend in writing doesn't catch on. (I never much liked "graphical" either) Flame away. :)
Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by mordero on Thursday November 27, 2014 @01:02PM (#8668262)
In American English, the correct form is "Company X is" where the company is considered singular. However, in British English, the correct form is/can be "Company X are" where the company is considered plural.

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1338/are-collecti...

Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by jbrooksuk on Thursday November 27, 2014 @12:11PM (#8668071)
1&1 are guilty of this too.
Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by kbar13 on Thursday November 27, 2014 @12:17PM (#8668092)
1&1 is the scum of the internet.
Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by paromi on Thursday November 27, 2014 @12:43PM (#8668192)
care to explain this ? whats wrong with 1&1 ?
Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by jbrooksuk on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @08:41AM (#8722607)
Terrible technical setup, we have a dedicated server that can't be guaranteed an upgrade without losing the absolute server paths.
Re:Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 by iancarroll on Thursday November 27, 2014 @02:11PM (#8668488)
Bad services. Someone even social engineered our 1&1 account a few years back...