Numerous service errors on AWS today | Hacker News Reader

Numerous service errors on AWS today

status.aws.amazon.com

23 pointslenova11 comments

We've weathered the last few outages very well, but we got hit badly by this one.

This is what I believe happened to us: We had a lot of Spot instances. After about two hours of not being able to spin up instances, the Spot market went screwy and prices shot up on multiple instance types across multiple availability zones at the same time.

This screwed us. Many of our redundant services were deployed to multiple spot instances across multiple availability zones and most of them were terminated at the same time. Afterwards, we weren't able to spin up replacements and had to scramble to move our key services onto unrelated instances that were spared.

Lesson learned. Multiple availability zones aren't enough to protect you from wild spot price fluctuations and an AWS outage can aggravate spot prices pretty dramatically.

Also, as a final note, I feel this outage was severe enough to warrant something other than a green, everything's OK!!! icon.

You are a brave soul to use Spot instance for key services. Just curious, what kind of workload do you do on the spot instances? Fact: spot instances are usually cheaper and more stable in a less dense region outside of U.S. if you don't care about latency.

We manage hundreds of servers and have been migrating more and more to spot instances in order to save on costs. It was only a portion of our infrastructure, but it was just enough to cause us grief. Given the volume of servers and the velocity with which our software has been changing, I'll readily admit it's been a challenge keeping ahead of everything and we definitely went a little too far with the spot instances in a few places, but we just haven't seen this failure mode before so we got overconfident.

You're always welcome to come try Preemptible VMs (https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/) so that bidding isn't what kicks you out. Massive regional failure could absolutely still stock out any spare capacity product, but it seems doubly worse to get charged extra for it.

Disclosure: I work on Preemptible VMs at Google.

EC2 spot blocks already provide support for keeping spot instances for a specified period of time.

The price of spot blocks still varies (so in this case, trying to create new ones would likely have been very expensive), are limited to 1-6 hours, and have a substantially smaller discount. When you add the hourly billing vs per-minute, it's very rare that spot blocks comes out ahead. Don't get me wrong, if you're on AWS and know your duration, use them!

I love how i haven't been able to launch a new instance for hours and the status page is still all green check marks, oh a few of them have an "i" subscript.

"Everything is working!"

(Minor note: It's not working.)

Amazon often hides issues behind a green icon and you find about issues post factum. This wastes so much energy instead of being open and report in real-time.

Love how Amazon pushes multi-AZ redundancy when it's always an entire region that gets screwed up. Oh, and us-east-1 again? Seriously?

when I worked there I always thought it was odd the concept of "green eye" and how every service can define it themselves. one of the few political stuff I remember during my time.

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