[packetslave]

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.

[latchkey]

Our best was a bird landing on a transformer up on a pole. Installed a fake Eagle after that.

[mhb]

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.

[latchkey]

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.

[mhb]

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.