Tag: Amazon EBS

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Amazon Web Services suffered a 20-hour outage over Christmas

After a rather bumpy 2012 with some heavy outages the cloud infrastructure of the Amazon Web Services again experienced some problems over Christmas. During a 20 hour outage several big customers were affected, including Netflix and Heroku. This time the main problem was Amazons Elastic Load Balancer (ELB).

Region US-East-1 is a very big problem

This outage is the last out of a series of catastrophic failure in Amazon’s US-East Region-1. It is the oldest and most popular region in Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure. This new outage precisely in US-East-1 raises new questions about the stability of this region and what Amazon has actually learned and actually improved from the past outages. Amazon customer awe.sm had recently expressed criticism of the Amazon cloud and especially on Amazon EBS (Amazon Elastic Block Store) and the services that depend on it.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)

Besides the Amazon Elastic Beanstalk API the Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) was mainly affected by the outage. Amazon ELB belongs to one of the important services if you try to build a scalable and highly available infrastructure in the Amazon cloud. With ELB users can move loads and capacities between different availability zones (Amazon independent data centers), to ensure availability when it comes to problems in one data center.

Nevertheless: both Amazon Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon ELB rely on Amazon EBS, which is known as the “error prone-backbone of the Amazon Web Services“.