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by deanCommie 3960 days ago
AWS is so massive that even when 0.1% of the customers are having problems, it is huge news like this.

The reality is most customers are not affected, and overall service uptime is highest anywhere around.

Not to mention that whenever AWS is having issues it's always in one region at a time, and frequently a single availability zone. As long as you build your application to be AZ-tolerant, you won't run into problems.

5 comments

The reality is most customers are not affected, and overall service uptime is highest anywhere around.

Unfortunately it's really impossible to say in this case, since they don't release numbers. Informally everyone I know with S3 buckets in US-Default had issues this morning.

As long as you build your application to be AZ-tolerant, you won't run into problems.

What you say about multiple AZs is true for EC2, but many other AWS services (especially EBS-backed ones) tend to go down across the entire region. If you're serious about availability, you really need to be in multiple regions.

> As long as you build your application to be AZ-tolerant, you won't run into problems.

This is a total crock. On the 31st of July, our ec2 instances across 2 availability zones were shutdown without warning. I waited 3 hours not being able to do anything. So far I've only got info from first level support and it's been "escalated".

S3 is already supposed to be AZ-tolerant. In the US Standard region, they say your data is actually replicated across multiple geographic locations in Virginia and the Pacific Northwest. That's probably true—your data may be highly durable—but availability incidents can apparently span both geographic regions.
> As long as you build your application to be AZ-tolerant, you won't run into problems.

And the perfect "out" for AWS, every single time they have issues.

I avoid almost all of these snafus simply by not putting anything in Virginia.