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Ask HN: Why is EC2 more often down than Amazon?

2 points by Uchikoma ↗ HN
EC2 seems to have trouble sometimes, like recently, with one or more data centers or central infrastructure down. This leads to company websites and large parts of the startup world being down even for those one thinks are multi-data center and know their stuff like Foursquare.

Why is Amazon (never?) down? Do they use other hardware? Is Foursquare and like not as good in designing failsafe setups as one thinks?

2 comments

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manasgarg
I had talked to someone inside Amazon once. I forgot the name and the position but his role had something to do with evangelizing AWS. According to him, Amazon runs only part of the infrastructure over AWS. That probably explains why Amazon remains mostly unaffected by EC2 outage.
jasonkester
Individual servers are expected to go down from time to time. Even entire datacenters will drop offline for short periods from time to time.

Amazon knows this and builds their system to be tolerant of pieces dropping off.

Further, Amazon recommends that other sites do this, and have built EC2 and their other cloud stuff specifically so that you can do it without too much headache.

There are plenty of sites running off of EC2 (Amazon included) that don't drop off the internet every time a downtime happens. They're the ones who prepared for such an eventuality ahead of time (and paid for the extra infrastructure needed to do something about it).