Skip to main content

Business Bonus: AWS Outage (12/7/2021)

 

There was an AWS outage a few days ago; You were probably impacted in one way or another.

text: I got an email from my washing maching saying aws-east-1 was off line so that's....a thing

If any of my appliances would ever e-mail me, I think I'd die of shock.

Every thing from Disney+ to McDonalds was affected, as US-East-1 was US-East-None for a few hours. Even Amazon delivery drivers and warehouse workers couldn't complete their breakneck, no bathroom, tasks.

My Alexa couldn't reach AWS. "Guess I better attach it to the new hotspot..." I thought, before moving on with my day and not doing that. Turns out, my hotspot wasn't the issue.


This is not the first cloud provider outage to happen, not even this year. So, how can technicians prevent this from happening?

Outages will happen, and this may have broken whatever 5 9's streak AWS strives for as a whole, but I'm 100% sure AWS networking technicians are working to implement high-level ways to recover quickly from this in the future. Someone uncovered that error, and should be commended. Who knows how long it would have been lying in wait?

That doesn't mean you can't be prepared. The streaming giant Netflix uses AWS to host its thousands of shows and movies - and they still have onsite systems and network engineers in Los Gatos, California.

What about multi-cloud?  That a thought, but this Twitter thread showed me the cons to that idea. 

I think nothing but the absolute largest companies would benefit from multi-cloud; The question is, can it be justified cost-wise. 

What would work for your company - 

Losing x$ during a 4 hour outage
Spending x$ a year to maintain two cloud relationships?

It depends partially on how often you expect your primary cloud provider to fail - Something that's happening more and more.

VentureBeat has a great article of what happened, with thoughts from many industry professionals.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making KPI Dashboards with PowerBI

 While this is the free tier, I cannot share or collaborate with others, nor can I publish content to other people's workspaces, but they will not stop me from screenshooting and recording these self-taught adventures,so! I'm doing this because I idly searched "Mattel careers" and "Information Technology", and seeing a bulletpoint saying the following: Analytical and reporting skills such as creating dashboards and establishing KPIs such as experience with PowerBI, Cognos, Tableau, and Google Data Lake/AWS is preferred And thought "Well, I've used Tableau, and I've heard about PowerBI,  even if its in-demandness is questionable , so how similar is it? And can I write about it?"  First, PowerBI (PIB) does have a downloadable, local version, but apparently Windows-only. I could download the .exe but I couldn't run it / drag it to applications on my MacBook.  Not a problem, we'll use the online SaaS version, and a dataset found here, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Log Sorting with AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudWatch Insights

 The cool thing is, I was contracted to make these videos in collaboration with CloudAvail Technology Consulting to help people decide which service they wanted to use for their logging - AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudWatch Insights, DataDog, or New Relic. I'm searching through nginx logs. I have accompanying videos of each service that you can find on the CloudAvail Youtube page; See these links to go to the DataDog and NewRelic posts.   The idea was to be subjective in the videos, but I can be objective on my personal blog.     CloudWatch     The syntax is odd, but easy to grasp. Sort log data by IP addresses, message codes, and status codes. The simplest query system, but not quite robust.   Insights       The syntax has changed - Vastly. I see major SQL influences. You can see that in how the parse function works - in this case, it's often taken pieces of a pre-existing standard - in this case, message - and breaking them into their own c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

 If you're seeing this post, I'm helping you, and you probably have LI presence: React and share this post to help me in return.   In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an...
Post a Comment
Read more