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by alfalfasprout 1429 days ago
Interesting to see it's been a loss of power that caused this. Usually the better datacenters have multiple levels of power redundancy including emergency backup generators.
3 comments

It depends entirely on how AWS architected their power redundancy. Given that the outage affected a portion of one DC in one AZ, we can make some assumptions, but the truth is we just don't know.

It could be that their shared-fate scope is an entire data hall, or a set of rows, or even an entire building given that an AZ is made up of multiple datacenters. I don't know that AWS has ever published any kind of sub-AZ guarantees around reliability.

Datacenter power has all kinds of interesting failure modes. I've seen outages caused by a cat climbing into a substation, rats building a nest in a generator, fire-fighting in another part of the building causing flooding in the high-voltage switching room, etc.

Our best was a bird landing on a transformer up on a pole. Installed a fake Eagle after that.
Given the scope of the effort invested in attempting to prevent duck and goose crap on the world's docks, I'm skeptical that this tactic is effective.
Shrug... the datacenter is land locked (different animal species) and the problem hasn't happened again in multiple years.

I think you're taking the Eagle a bit too seriously though... if we didn't do anything how would we know? It isn't like this was an expensive thing to try out.

OK. It's just that I am one of those people who have tried to solve the duck/goose problem and would be delighted if a fake eagle or owl worked.
Insert clip of O'Brien explaining to cardassians why there are backups for backups
In case anyone is unaware of the reference, that’s taken from Star Trek Deep Space 9 https://youtu.be/UaPkSU8DNfY
Ya, am I surprised by this too. Like, you have one job, keep the power on.