I'm seeing a lot of these type of comment. The thing is, AWS completely crapped out. Don't believe their status updates that make it sound like it was a tiny little area of their data center. It was pretty much the entire zone and then whenever there is an outage affecting an entire zone it brings down global services and even other zones as well.
We had servers in the bad zone and started having load issues. When I went to use the cool cloud features that are made for this, the entire thing completely fell on its face. I couldn't launch new EC2 servers either because the API was so bogged down, or the new zone I was launching in was restricted because of load.
Basically, the thing that nobody keeps in mind when they think it's so cool that you can spin up servers to work around outages is that EVERYONE IS DOING THAT. This is Amazon's entire selling point and when it comes to doing it, it doesn't work!
We were lucky to get some new servers launched before the API pretty much completely went down. They started giving everyone errors saying request limit exceeded. The forums were full of people asking about it.
ELB, Elastic IP, and other services not associated with a single availability zone completely failed. I keep seeing comments saying that if people designed their stuff right, they wouldn't have an issue. That's just completely bull, AWS has serious design flaws and they show up at every outage. It's NOT just people relying on a single zone.
Totally Agree. A lot of people don't know this, or substitute alternatives which are not necessarily viable. Among the tenants of reliability is isolation. The nature of Amazon's services is that it isolates at the datacenter level. One should isolate at the level in which they are comfortable taking on failures. Once there is an active dependency, a la EBS, the number of subsystems increase multi-fold and the likelihood of failure & cascading failure dramatically increases.
Where getting a bit from disk to memory used to be: platter -> diskcontroller -> cpu -> memory,
now with SANs & NFS & virtualized block storage, it's:
platter -> diskcontroller -> cpu -> memory -> nic -> wire -> switch(es)/router(s)/network configs(human config item) -> wire -> nic -> cpu -> memory.
Not to say that centralized storage doesn't have its benefits, but now the scope of isolation has drastically increased, which when considering the combinatorial possibilities of failure in the prior scenario vs the latter, the latter has a significantly larger chance and mode of failure that is significantly more difficult to programmatically automate failover.
TLDR: With amazon, the scope is isolation is the datacenter. To be on amazon, one must architect and design at the scope of handling failure at the datacenter level, rather than at the host or cluster level.
We didn't have downtime for various reasons but the ELBs we were using failed and the queue of starting instances was too big to see our few ones restarting.
The main systematic issue in EC2 is EBS, take that away and it will almost completely remove downtimes.
The problem with ELBs is that they are themselves EC2 instances and use many of the global services for detecting load, scaling up, etc.. Like all of AWS's value-added services, they are therefore more likely to fail during an outage event, not less likely, as they depend on more services.
Can someone please explain daring fireball to me? Every single post appears to be about how great Apple is. That can't seriously be the blog, can it? Why would people read this?
I think Gruber seems to be a smart guy but all of his posts seem to praise Apple and hate on non-Apple especially Google. I think he says some interesting things but I just can't take the guy seriously. He's like the RMS for Apple.
What makes DF interesting (or at least relevant) is that John Gruber tends to think like Apple does (as a collective). Steve Jobs even went so far as to use Gruber's rationalization during the iOS vs Flash debacle as an example of a well reasoned argument.
The short version is: Gruber is a good read if you want to know what Apple is thinking.
His columns are almost always written about Apple's actions either in hindsight or in the very near term future, but he makes very few predictions or longer-term insights.
I find Gruber unreadable simply because he is so predictable. If it's about Apple, then it's praise; and if it's about Android, it's criticism.
That said, I think he's smart and knows exactly what he's doing. His audience is probably about 95% Apple product owners and he does a great job at suppressing any cognitive dissonance they may have regarding their Apple purchases - which keeps them coming back.
Reading his column is just another ritual for faithful followers of the Church of Apple.
Correct me if I'm wrong but those revenue numbers wouldn't account for other products driving their ad revenue. Gmail probably isbresponsible for ablot of ad revenue but would be be considered as not moving the needle.
I think the ad revenue is so high because it's the end goal of nearly every "fun" product.
I've never heard that before. I think Google gets the money. Verizon probably gets a cut just for the carrier billing option when used.
I just did a search and couldn't find anything saying Verizon gets the money for android app payments.
Also I can't think of a single Google Android app that has been discontinued and replaced with a web version. I think you're getting confused about google also offering mobile web versions for platforms they can't get their apps on. They've even said they'd like to offer a better maps app for iPhone but can't.
"Developers will get 70% of the revenue from each purchase; the remaining amount goes to carriers and billing settlement fees — Google does not take a percentage. We believe this revenue model creates a fair and positive experience for users, developers, and carriers," notes Eric Chu.
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This statement was at that time interpreted, that Google is buying marketshare from the carriers.
I don't know if the sentence "Google does not take a persentage" still stands and how the transactions fee is splitted today.
An issue of wired I think 2 months ago claimed that the current payout was 30% to Verizon and 70% to the developer with Google getting no cut from app sales. Obviously their information could have been dated as well.
We had servers in the bad zone and started having load issues. When I went to use the cool cloud features that are made for this, the entire thing completely fell on its face. I couldn't launch new EC2 servers either because the API was so bogged down, or the new zone I was launching in was restricted because of load.
Basically, the thing that nobody keeps in mind when they think it's so cool that you can spin up servers to work around outages is that EVERYONE IS DOING THAT. This is Amazon's entire selling point and when it comes to doing it, it doesn't work!
We were lucky to get some new servers launched before the API pretty much completely went down. They started giving everyone errors saying request limit exceeded. The forums were full of people asking about it.
ELB, Elastic IP, and other services not associated with a single availability zone completely failed. I keep seeing comments saying that if people designed their stuff right, they wouldn't have an issue. That's just completely bull, AWS has serious design flaws and they show up at every outage. It's NOT just people relying on a single zone.