AWS endures extended outage in Australia

Sysadmins in Sydney had a horrible Sunday, while their CEOs bent their attention to wondering why their Foxtel Rugby sportscasts weren't working. The Amazon Web Services AWS "power event" AP-SOUTHEAST-2 Region was almost certainly caused by a massive storm system that ran from Brisbane to the NSW South Coast, leading to a …

[DainB]

Not an Equinix outage for sure.

AWS is hosted at Equinix in Sydney and there were no notifications of any issues at any of Equinix sites in Sydney or any disruption to other customers at SY3 where Amazon servers are.

[Ken Moorhouse]

B-B-b-but surely The Cloud has Biblical Powers?

To part the waves and that kind of stuff?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's one of the great things about AWS - even though their status pages are wildly inaccurate, they are so big a quick twitter search will tell you if there are widespread problems :-)

Seriously, the big issue from yesterday's event was that even though only one AZ was affected, the official AWS APIs were constantly returning errors regardless of which AZ you were calling them from. Which means that even if you spread your estate across multiple AZs for H/A purposes, if you relied on making calls to the AWS APIs (e.g. to remap elastic IPs to fail over NAT instances for example) you were stuffed. I'm guessing that's why the big guys like Foxtel etc failed.

Luckily we rely on boring old DNS failover for our ap-southeast-2 resources - worked a treat !

[Baskitcaise]

Rincewind?

It may be "him" and that bloody bent piece of wood onna long string thingy?

[Anonymous Coward]

AWS

Thou shalt not be critical of AWS - they can do no wrong :-)