Comments on: S3 Outage: the Aftermath

By: SanP

SanP — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:32:24 +0000

Nirvanix is the only service to provide a 100% SLA, you can read more about it on Web Host Industry News.

http://www.thewhir.com/marketwatch/061008_Nirvanix_Offers_Enterprise_Storage.cfm

I don’t use them right now but a company that is willing to provide this service level is worth a shot.

By: JD

JD — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:49:28 +0000

As a backup to S3, you’re right – it could make a lot of sense… and no question that both are a better deal than a full CDN.

JD (the pricing “JD” – not the “Nirvanix has a poor track record JD” ;-)

By: Mike Gunderloy

Mike Gunderloy — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:34:31 +0000

@JD – As far as pricing goes, I think a lot of services would swallow a 70% increase if they were using it only for backup purposes when Amazon was down. Less enticing if you think about switching everything over.

And in the grand scheme of things, it’s far, far less than you would pay a CDN like Akamai.

By: Steve Ireland

Steve Ireland — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:07:56 +0000

Forgot to ask yesterday, does anyone have experience with this Amazon-S3 Clone or similar: http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/parkplace/

By: Steve Ireland

Steve Ireland — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:06:26 +0000

When it’s internal you have a physical throat to choke i.e direct responsibility and authority to react to your priorities. This does however come at a fairly high cost. So a model we use is a hybrid of both: where in the case of a catastrophic failure we can guarantee 100% data integrity (e.g. a second copy of all data) and fallback to a degraded state of functionality when outages occur (e.g. allow file view but not file add etc).

By: JD

JD — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:54:27 +0000

I’m not so sure the pricing is “not too outrageously different.” By my math, it’s an increase of 70% or so (I looked at monthly costs for 100gb storage with 20gb up and 10gb down).

The price difference may not be worrisome for the Jungle Disk demographic (personal backups smaller than the above numbers), but would add up quick for sites/applications relying on S3 for lots of assets.

By: JD

JD — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:32:49 +0000

Except Nirvanix has an absolutely horrible track record:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/10/mediamaxthelinkup-closes-its-doors/#comments

I would stay as far away as possible from Nirvanix.

By: rickg

rickg — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:15:00 +0000

Of course going all inhouse simply means that YOU are on the line for service levels. It’s always interesting to see the unspoken assertion that people make when talking about failures like this – that they’d do better. That flies in the face of experience of course… most companies do NOT have 100% uptime even when they run everything in house.

The problem with the S3 outage was, i think, less that it was several hours than that it was several consecutive hours during the day. Had it been a series of hiccups at 3am spread out over a month there would be less comment.

By: Joel Strellner

Joel Strellner — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:18:22 +0000

We used them heavily before the outage. Primarily the SQS service, but also S3 to an extent.

We decided during the outage that it didn’t make sense for us to outsource critical services like we were to them. So during the outage, I coded up an entire replacement to SQS so that we don’t have to now. I think a lot of people are going to be doing this too.

Either people will realize their dependencies on Amazon and will be adding a middle layer, or they will go all in-house, like us.