Since we introduced our App Status Dashboards page, it has proven to be our most popular offering. As most of what we offer is news that quickly gets stale that’s not surprising, though it is sort of heartening that something with serious rather than humorous intent is finally edging out our most popular post ever.
How can we make it better? Send any ideas to richard at cloud news daily dot com.
Amusing glitch shows a programmer’s well-intentioned variable substitution. I think I’ll tweet about this. No, wait…. Um, if I can’t tweet about it it’s like it didn’t happen!
Amazon has provided their take on how the big derecho storm that hit the Eastern US (and still leaves millions without power during a heat wave) brought down one of their data centers. Basically it was “hardware failure” — in this case a couple of emergency generators.
In the single datacenter that did not successfully transfer to the generator backup, all servers continued to operate normally on Uninterruptable Power Supply (“UPS”) power. As onsite personnel worked to stabilize the primary and backup power generators, the UPS systems were depleting and servers began losing power at 8:04pm PDT.
Read the AWS statement for more detail.
The New York Times has an interesting article on new concerns over Cloud Computing (that is to say, AWS) reliability in the wake of recent outages caused by the weather.
The interruption underlined how businesses and consumers are increasingly exposed to unforeseen risks and wrenching disruptions as they increasingly embrace life in the cloud. It was also a big blow to what is probably the fastest-growing part of the media business, start-ups on the social Web that attract millions of users seemingly overnight.
As someone who was involved during the pre-cloud era in private data centers and later colocation facilities for startups, small and medium-sized companies, I have a question:
Does anyone really think they can do any better on their own?
From the AWS Service Health Dashboard:
9:32 AM PDT Connectivity has been restored to the affected subset of EC2 instances and EBS volumes in the single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 region. New instance launches are completing normally. Some of the affected EBS volumes are still re-mirroring causing increased IO latency for those volumes.
As happened earlier this month the failure was apparently triggered by power systems failures. The US-EAST-1 data center in Virginia is Amazon’s oldest.
As in the past, the outage hurt customers relying on a single center.
Related articles
From the AWS Service Health Dashboard this morning:
7:45 AM PDT We are investigating possible connectivity issues for a small number of instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.
8:11 AM PDT We can confirm network connectivity issues for some EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region. Customers may be experiencing network impairment or connectivity issues to their EBS volumes performing read/write operations. We are actively working to resolve this issue.
8:37 AM PDT We can confirm network connectivity issues for some EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 region. Customers may be experiencing impaired read/write access to their EBS volumes. New instance launches are also delayed. We are actively working to resolve this issue.
