Comments on: Cloud Platforms Heroku, DotCloud & Engine Yard Hit Hard By Amazon Outage

By: Scott McDonald

Scott McDonald — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:08:48 +0000

Good points – also note its not that hard to failover to another cloud site. I recommend using 2 different cloud vendors (EC2 and Linode.com) – setting up mysql replication between the instances, automate rsync over ssh for web directories, so that both sites are always hot – and then use DNS Failover techniques to automatically redirect traffic between them.

But I’m biased – as I offer DNS Failover services anyone can afford at dnshat.com so take this with a grain of salt – but I’ve seen this type of automated failover setup work great for many clients using traditional lamp stacks.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 16:59:58 +0000

Joe

Can you share what things your did in order to make the AWS infrastructure work for you guys?

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 16:59:10 +0000

Thanks Bob. Though Derrick Harris wrote the post. Loved your post.

By: Derek

Derek — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 16:30:31 +0000

No infrastructure is bulletproof. I think the key is that services that do host with AWS, do they have a failover to another cloud? One of the reasons our LongJump PaaS (http://longjump.com) remains hosted on a managed provider rather than purely in an IaaS is that it is still possible for us to switch over to another set of servers. So even though the possibility exists for a server-related shutdown, we can at least recover on our own and not wait for the “Cloud to Clear.”

But I should note that we’re not bad-mouthing any IaaS. We use them all the time for development and testing. But since our PaaS is our bread and butter, we just tend to be a bit more traditional on the server side. Hosting on private servers, while more of an investment and less elastic, is also the least risky.

By: Roberto

Roberto — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 09:44:40 +0000

If security and reliability is important to your customers you should still consider dedicated hardware. It takes quite a lot of extra work but in our case we are happy, also in terms of availability and costs.

By: ElasticHosts cloud servers

ElasticHosts cloud servers — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 07:38:41 +0000

For all customers affected by EC2 downtime, I would like to recommend ElasticHosts as an alternative cloud service (www.elastichosts.com) – we offer a 5 day free trial for our cloud servers in US or UK, which is likely enough at least to bridge the gap.

By: Joe Stump

Joe Stump — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 04:26:01 +0000

SimpleGeo didn’t go down. Our apparently unique architecture assumes core AWS services can, and will, fail.

By: Bob Warfield

Bob Warfield — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 03:55:33 +0000

Good summary, Om.

You can’t count on Amazon for your disaster recovery, nor perhaps your PaaS provider either. That’s not to say quit using Amazon or PaaS’s, just that your customers will make you responsible. There have been mechanisms available for a while now that would’ve mitigated a lot of these troubles. Companies like Netflix have used them and been fine.