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by St-Clock 3400 days ago
I am unpleasantly surprised that they do not mention why services that should be unrelated to S3 such as SES were impacted as well and what they are doing to reduce such dependencies.

From a software development perspective, it makes sense to reuse S3 and rely on it internally if you need object storage, but from an ops perspective, it means that S3 is now a single point of failure and that SES's reliability will always be capped by S3's reliability. From a customer perspective, the hard dependency between SES and S3 is not obvious and is disappointing.

The whole internet was talking about S3 when the AWS status dashboard did not show any outage, but very few people mentioned other services such as SES. Next time we encounter errors with SES, should we check for hints of S3 outage before everything else? Should we also check for EC2 outage?

1 comments

services that should be unrelated to S3 such as SES were impacted

I don't think this is particularly surprising. I'd already pretty much assumed that, e.g., a package of code for a Lambda function would be housed in an S3 bucket somewhere.

What's really surprising to me is how many of those buckets appear to live in US-EAST-1, and aren't able to keep functioning in a catastrophe by failing over to a different region.

You specify the run region for each of those services and all the other components get restricted to those regions too.

We're in ap-southeast-2 (Sydney) and none of our services were impacted yesterday.