Could Sandy Storm Lead To Another AWS Outage?

9 pointsamnigos2 comments

If you have AWS deployments in US-EAST, it's good to move latest copy of backups to US-WEST and be prepared for BCP.

There is some talk about potential major power outages in the east coast. If any of these power outages strike the region where US-EAST is located, it is possible that an outage could happen.

Netflix has spoken and blogged about how they were affected and what changes they made to minimize downtime.

http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/lessons-netflix-learned-...

So, the one bit of good news is that the AWS instances are at least in Virginia, which is significanly further inland than the scope of Sandy is currently projected to be -- or at least will avoid the brunt of the storm.

That said, to date, I've been without power for ever major AWS outage this year, so in a sense it's all kind of been imaginary, as I haven't seen the impact first hand (I'm in Maryland).

It's very possible that US-EAST could get hit, and you should of course plan accordingly, but my educated guess for Sandy is that VA will probably be okay, as I'm not seeing substantial impact pushing past the DC area in the forecast.

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