Curiosity phones home through Amazon cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has outlined how its infrastructure was used to power mars.jpl.nasa.gov in order to “…deliver successfully engaging experiences of Mars to the public” without going titsup at peak traffic times. In a case study outlining the cloud rig assembled to bring news of Curiosity’s adventures from one world to …

[Martin Budden]

Is this the service that overloaded?

If so, I'm surprised they are bragging about it. http://xkcd.com/1091/

[jake]

::yawns:: This ain't new.

It looks like the last major Usenet system I designed and implemented.

In 1995ish.

[Magani]

Hmmm...

Seems like its effects here at the arse end of The Greater Antipodes were minimal as my browser went into waiting mode and never managed to get a decent handle on the live NASA video stream.

By the look of the diagram, Amazon have Elastic Load Balancers. Is this a high tech term for braces to keep your strides over your tummy?

Penguins don't need no steenkin' braces to keep their tux together.

[Tank boy]

A thought...

I highly doubt NASA/JPL put all of the collective eggs in one basket with AWS. Of course it would have made a great scapegoat if things hadn't gone exactly to plan. I wonder what the back-up plan Amazon had if the thing had gone titsup?

[Ian Prickett]

Well their site sucked for me

Lots of missing thumbnails that wouldn't load on the raw pictures page, had to wait for an hour before the site was usable.

[Danny Roberts 1]

Re: Well their site sucked for me

Agreed; the video stream (and matching animation) were flawless but the thumbnail image page was practically dead.

[Rabbit80]

Worked well as far as I was concerned

I didn't have a single dropout, and everything on their site worked fine for me during the entire landing. I was actually quite surprised to hear other people had issues!

[JeffyPooh]

Strange, NASA TV iPhone app worked for me

No complaints here; except it was in oh-dark-hundred in the middle of the damn night.

Can you really call it "Live" coverage when it's actually on a 14 minute space-delay?