FYI Netflix is down

Mon Jul 2 02:38:16 UTC 2012

On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

> Not entirely.  Datacenters do go down, our best efforts to the contrary
> notwithstanding.  Amazon doesn't guarantee you redundancy on EC2, only
> the tools to provide it yourself.  25% Amazon; 75% service provider
> clients;
> that's my appraisal of the blame.
>

>From a Wired article:

> That’s what was supposed to happen at Netflix Friday night. But it didn’t
> work out that way. According to Twitter messages from Netflix Director of
> Cloud Architecture Adrian Cockcroft and Instagram Engineer Rick Branson, it
> looks like an Amazon Elastic Load Balancing service, designed to spread
> Netflix’s processing loads across data centers, failed during the outage.
> Without that ELB service working properly, the Netflix and Pintrest
> services hosted by Amazon crashed.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/real-clouds-crush-amazon/

The GSLB fail-over that was supposed to take place for the affected
services (that had configured their applications to fail-over) failed.

I heard about this the day after Google announced the Compute Engine
addition to the App Engine product lines they have. The demo was awesome.
I imagine Google has GSLB down pat by now, so some companies might start
looking... ;-]

--steve