OT: Question/Netflix issues?

Wed Mar 23 01:27:05 UTC 2011

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 6:20 PM, Ryan Malayter <malayter at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Mar 22, 7:47 pm, Jeff Kell <jeff-k... at utc.edu> wrote:
>> Now getting "We re sorry, the Netflix website and the ability to
>> instantly watch movies are both temporarily unavailable." out of Charter.
>>
>> Campus getting same routed via 1239 209 2906.
>>
>> Jeff
>
> Guess that move to Amazon EC2 wasn't such a good idea. First reddit,
> now netflix.
> http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/four-reasons-we-choose-amazons-cloud-as.html
>
> I suppose there's a reason you can't get an SLA with any teeth from
> Amazon...

You're assuming that the outage was somehow related to the quality of
hosting (virtual server, instance management, etc).

In my experience with large website failures, some of mine and talking
to others at conferences and elsewhere, I can't recall one where the
servers HW performance / virtualization management were the root cause
(and only one that was intrinsically hardware-based, which was a
catastrophic storage failure and not server failure).  Configuration
management, inadequate testing of new software, systems management
error, DBMS throughput capacity, emergent software / architecture
failures are the usual culprits.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com