From a practical point of view, the solution is simple, allow EBS to fail in certain areas to cordon off the damage. Size was a key variable here that made the outage take so long to recover from.
On point 1, in my opinion, this was not a single point of failure. Thus the need for the adjective "Cascading" That is, it was no more a single point of failure as relying on "hard drives" would be. ie. the "sigle point" was the technology itself, not a physical single point, obviously.
So in my mind, the question is, can the technology be modified to allow for failures or to restrict those failures while still utilizing the huge pool of hardware available to it effectively? It's a difficult problem, but not unsolvable.
TLDR; Half a page of lorem ipsum as a vehicle for these two:
Vendors such as AWS are known to run their own data
centres at a level of Tier II or low Tier III maximum
Other vendors such as ourselves take the approach of
locating in premium high TierIII or TierIV data centres
3 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 14.5 ms ] threadAt this point it has become clear that EBS failed due to a cascading failure as EBS volumes were mirrored across datacenters. http://joyeur.com/2011/04/22/on-cascading-failures-and-amazo...
From a practical point of view, the solution is simple, allow EBS to fail in certain areas to cordon off the damage. Size was a key variable here that made the outage take so long to recover from.
On point 1, in my opinion, this was not a single point of failure. Thus the need for the adjective "Cascading" That is, it was no more a single point of failure as relying on "hard drives" would be. ie. the "sigle point" was the technology itself, not a physical single point, obviously.
So in my mind, the question is, can the technology be modified to allow for failures or to restrict those failures while still utilizing the huge pool of hardware available to it effectively? It's a difficult problem, but not unsolvable.