[samstokes]

You're confusing AWS regions with AWS availability zones. You're not technically wrong - it is possible to have your application spread across regions and doing so would have protected against this outage - but doing so is slow and expensive, and the actual failover to a different region is difficult. Amazon explicitly recommends that if you distribute across multiple availability zones within the same region, you should be robust to the majority of outages, which should only take out one AZ. The current AWS outage is affecting all AZs in the US-East region, which Amazon claims should never happen.

This earlier post [1] (HN discussion [2]) discusses this in more detail.

[1] http://justinsb.posterous.com/aws-down-why-the-sky-is-fallin...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2471899

[pan69]

No, I'm not confusing regions with availability zones. What I'm saying is that AWS gives you all the components to set up a website that never goes down. If you don't take advantage of this then there is no else to blame but yourself. Of course doing this can be very expensive and it's choice you have to make.

Some people keep saying things like; "Well, Amazon promised us that zones don't have a single point of failure". Well, sucked in I guess. Apparently they do.

[jpetazzo]

Amazon promised that regions wouldn't see two zones going down at the same time. That's totally different, and that's what happened today.

[pan69]

"Amazon promised"

Well, that just sounds incredibly naive.

[markerdmann]

Ok, come on. Now you're just trolling. Amazon also promises not to share your credit card information. It should be obvious that trust is necessary in business.

[e40]

Would you just please tell everyone here how you think it should be done rather than talking around the issue?? Otherwise, you're just another troll.

[shykes]

Why don't you expose how you would go about designing this invincible website? We are all very eager to learn from you.