[aaronsw]

The "What we are doing" section seems pretty weak. The only substantive thing they say is "we have produced new tools which enable us to more expediently relocate database services from a failed availability zone."

How exactly are they planning to deal with the larger Cedar difficulties? Are they going to eliminate their dependence on ELBs? Go multi-region? Developers need to know this to decide whether to continue with Heroku or build their own platform.

[rdl]

Compare/contrast to https://status.heroku.com/incidents/151 where they did talk about moving to multiregion, etc., but then never executed on it, which is probably worse. Maybe they will underpromise and overdeliver.

Personally, I'd shitcan EBS to the extent possible, RDS I never would have used, and it looks like ELB is non-viable as well.

If you're a large site (particularly a PaaS) on AWS and care about availability, you need to have spare capacity in your region (using RIs, like Netflix does) to cover when a single AZ disappears, and your own external to AWS load balancing (not dns based), with your own per-AZ subsidiary load balancers (nginx or whatever) running within EC2. You need a robust database layer, ideally multi-region or AWS+nonAWS, but that's more site specific.

Going multiregion is the next step, and the above is an essential part of getting to that point.

[genwin]

What's an RI, please? That one's hard to search for.

[rdl]

Reserved Instance (use the low duty cycle ones for availability)