Amazon Finally Apologizes for Epic Cloud Failure

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hellwig

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Didn't Google have some sort of cascading failure a year or two ago like this? Their redundant system detected a fault and switched the traffic over, which over-whelmed the secondary node causing it to shut-down, so forth and so on.

They seem to be thinking RAID 5/6 when they should be thinking RAID 1 (these are just analogies, I'm not talking actual storage configuration). That is, be 100% redundant, not 20% redundant. It's a lot more expensive, but it would take quite the disaster to bring your sytem down, not just an accidental "our secondary network can't handle the traffic from our primary network, oopsie".
 

hellwig

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[citation][nom]rad666[/nom]And that is why I hate "the cloud"...[/citation]
And what do you propose to do otherwise? There would be no difference between Foursquare hosting their own services and Amazon hosting those services, except that it would cost Foursquare a whole lot more to do the former than the latter. Even if every single website was hosted on private servers, those servers would still have to be redundant, with some sort of scheme to keep them up and running. "The Cloud" is just a B.S. term people came up with the sell crap. The internet has always been "the cloud". When you read a news story online, that story is hosted on a non-local webserver (in the cloud). A non-cloud news-source would be a newspaper, where the news is printed on paper physically in your possession. But if that paper gets lost or destroyed, you have to buy a new one. In "the cloud", if that news webserver goes down, there's a second one somewhere to ramp up and replace it.

Even if you download your email and store it locally on your PC, your email service is still "in the cloud". When someone sends you an email to douche-at-yahoo.com, it's the "cloudy" nature of Yahoo! that lets that email get to you, even if one set of mail servers is down. If you simply ran your own email server on your home network, you might miss an email if your connection went down for a decent length of time.

The cloud didn't fail here, Amazon did.
 

f-14

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somebody did a rain dance and brought down the cloud!
and yes hellwig it's a cloud failure, nobody could access jack shit, flavour it any way you like, it still taste like shit for the simple fact you could not get access to your info from some where else like you seemed to think it works.
i hope you remember that the next time a bridge fails and all traffic has to be routed to a side alley and then there is an accident in the side alley effectively stopping ALL traffic.
it's no different then if every line was chopped by an axe that accessed the cloud, nothing got thru not a single bit.
 

grieve

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[citation][nom]hellwig[/nom]The cloud didn't fail here, Amazon did.[/citation]

I can’t agree more, Amazon failed!
I bet a few job opportunities opened up over @ Amazon shortly after they realized what happened.
 

mayne92

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[citation][nom]hellwig[/nom]And what do you propose to do otherwise? There would be no difference between Foursquare hosting their own services and Amazon hosting those services, except that it would cost Foursquare a whole lot more to do the former than the latter. Even if every single website was hosted on private servers, those servers would still have to be redundant, with some sort of scheme to keep them up and running. "The Cloud" is just a B.S. term people came up with the sell crap. The internet has always been "the cloud". When you read a news story online, that story is hosted on a non-local webserver (in the cloud). A non-cloud news-source would be a newspaper, where the news is printed on paper physically in your possession. But if that paper gets lost or destroyed, you have to buy a new one. In "the cloud", if that news webserver goes down, there's a second one somewhere to ramp up and replace it.Even if you download your email and store it locally on your PC, your email service is still "in the cloud". When someone sends you an email to douche-at-yahoo.com, it's the "cloudy" nature of Yahoo! that lets that email get to you, even if one set of mail servers is down. If you simply ran your own email server on your home network, you might miss an email if your connection went down for a decent length of time.The cloud didn't fail here, Amazon did.[/citation]
Ah damn, you beat me to it! Awesome. :p
 
G

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The cloud did fail. The failure is akin to centralized food distribution vs. local food distribution: The central point of failure didn't contaminate a single town's hamburger with e. coli; it contaminated millions of tonnes of hamburger being served all over the world. If Foursquare's own hosting failed, Foursquare would have an outage, when Amazon has an outage, thousand's of companies have an outage.
 

rawoysters

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At least they apologized. Of the 3 tech meltdowns this week we got this apology, a "we regret the inconvenience" from Sony for the PSN debacle and a "we found a bug and by the way, how about a white Iphone?" from Apple.
 

Silmarunya

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Well, it's only natural some things go wrong. Cloud technology is still in its infancy. Do I need to remind you how unreliable most technology was/is when it is as rapidly developing as the 'cloud'?

In a few years time, knowledge and resources will have expanded enough to make the cloud reliable. Then, I'll happily use it. Not now.

Oh, and cloud failures end up getting lots of attention because they are so devastating in their impact. Yet if you were to combine all the minor failures around the world, you get disasters a lot larger than this one every day.

Just like with other news items, big things get all the attention while a vast amount of minor issues combined are far more important.
 

slipdisc

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[citation][nom]rad666[/nom]And that is why I hate "the cloud"...[/citation]
Any yet ironically, you post your displeasure for this by commenting on a web forum thats hosted in the "cloud".
 

bildo123

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[citation][nom]rad666[/nom]And that is why I hate "the cloud"...[/citation]

Perhaps perfect people like you should invent perfect systems with perfect track records? I'm all ears man.
 

gm0n3y

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This wasn't a problem with 'the cloud', it was a problem with 'the humans' managing the cloud. What I'm saying is that there is nothing wrong with the cloud technology, just the people managing it.
 
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