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Rackspace Goes Down. Again. Takes The Internet With It. Again.
- ryansloan 17y agoThis seems like a good candidate for http://sadtrombone.com http://sadtrombone.com
- dnsworks 17y agoIt's amusing that Techcrunch considers themselves and a handful of other startups "the internet". This is why we architect provider independent solutions. Keep your TTLs low. Replicate your site to another provider, and be prepared to hit the switch when your primary provider inevitably fails. All datacenters lose power, all networks get borked, and all storage systems fail. It's a fact of life.
- iigs 17y agoYeah the snotty attitude advanced in the article is pretty offensive. If you run something on the internet and rely on it for your dinner, you don't really have an excuse for single points of failure. Do your job. It's exceptionally easy to engineer around these issues if you don't just outsource all of your thinking to a provider.
- antirez 17y agowithout to mention how trivial is to replicate a blog.
- drusenko 17y agoI don't know, I sort of side with TechCrunch on this one. Yes, you can replicate a site (some easier than others, and a blog should be relatively easy), but that's still no excuse for datacenter downtime, and Rackspace has had a prolific amount of downtime. Any datacenter downtime is serious business -- at a good datacenter, it's a small-ish incident every few years. Rackspace, on the other hand, seems to have a large incident every few months, meaning it's probably best to take your servers elsewhere.
- ghshephard 17y agoI used to think that Data Center Downtime was serious business, but I've come around to believing that it shouldn't be. If your data center going down is a problem, then you don't really have a very robust failover plan. If, instead, you _plan_ for the Data Center to go down, and treat a data center failure as a trivial issue, then your DR plans start to become significantly more robust. In particular, the companies that I admire are ones that routinely swap, on a routine basis, their DR and production facilities - and when a production data center goes down they don't even bother to wait - they just light up the DR center and are back in business. Most of the SaaS Financial Hosting companies (Oracle Financials) that I've talked with will provide you with that feature.
- aaronbrethorst 17y agoMG Siegler, the author, isn't exactly the most technically astute person around, which isn't inherently bad except that he doesn't seem to recognize his own limitations around such matters. MG has a bad tendency of breathlessly reporting and misreporting on issues that are far outside of his area of expertise. One of my favorite examples happened a month ago when MG misdiagnosed CSS files not loading on Twitter as 'BRAND NEW FEATURES THAT ARE UGLY, OMG!' (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/17/twitter-just-ui-puked-on-my-timeline/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/17/twitter-just-ui-puked-o...).
- nikcub 17y agoWe have a backup. Guess where it was. Now guess where it will be tonight.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Confusion 17y agoIt's exceptionally easy to engineer around these issues if you don't just outsource all of your thinking to a provider. Can we stop blaming internet companies for outsourcing certain responsibilities? A decent hosting provider should ensure there isn't a single point of failure in their service. You don't ask a random company to set up their own accountancy department either: there are specialized companies to which you can outsource that. They bear the responsibility for faulty reports, as Rackspace bears the responsibility for not having a decent failover setup. As a specialist of some sort, you have better things to do than to think about what is needed for a proper failover setup. Especially because you will still miss certain subtle details, because you are not an expert in handling a datacentre failure. You should hire experts to set that up for you and a hosting provider has those experts. Honest to God, what's with this attitude of 'if something on the internet fails, it's your own fault, because we are all smart enough to take care of all those contingencies'? 1: we aren't; failover handling is prone to subtle bugs. What tptacek keeps saying about security also holds for contingency handling. 2: it's not smart to spend your time bothering with intricate, but ultimately mundane, issues that can be outsourced.
- endtime 17y agoPardon my ignorance, but how do you hit the switch? Or, rather, what is the switch? DNS is slow to propagate, and if you have some kind of server for your "switch" then isn't that still a single point of failure?
- iigs 17y agoGreat question. In the common case, the solution is to set low TTLs (time to live attributes: they tell the DNS server how long to cache the name) on the DNS records, so they expire quickly. You can also run a pair of "front end" servers at all times, and use magic in the back-end to replicate the DB between sites. Depending on the type of site in question this can be really easy or really hard. Another (generally commercial hardware) solution is to receive the query to one DNS server. This DNS server waits to respond for a few milliseconds while it sends a copy of the query to the other DNS server. They have different answers for the question (dns-east will return the IP for www-east, likewise for dns-west and www-west). They return the answers at the same time, and the closer server "wins" by getting to the recipient faster. This is called GSLB, Global Server Load Balancing.
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoBut your GSLB requires your DNS server to be up, which it won't be if the datacenter blacks-out. Ditto if you're running a "pair of 'front end' servers". Shouldn't DNS records have a reserve address too then the client could decide if failure had occurred to use the alternate address?
- michaelneale 17y agoAre low TTLs effective in practice? Sounds like a good idea, but what % of users are using DNSs that just ignore it and cache things well beyond what they should?
- andrewvc 17y agoWith a 60 second TTL I see most traffic drop off within 5 minutes, and almost all of it gone within 30 minutes. There's a few stragglers who seem to still be there even an hour after the switch, but by and large DNS TTL does work.
- antidaily 17y agoHoliday party. Someone spilled egg nog on a surge protector.
- tamersalama 17y agoI can't believe how TechCrunch is turning into a tech-tabloid. Yes, there are issues (perhaps sometimes serious) that needs reporting - but - the way it is done by TC isn't quite the quality I'm excepting.
- SamAtt 17y agoI agree with you but I'd bet those are TechCrunch's most popular posts. In fact, the author (MG Siegler) was essentially hired because he's good at writing those types of post. People like trashy journalism. It's like the Tiger Woods thing. I don't mind the networks reporting on it but the fact that it's been the top item on "legitimate" news sites should tell you how modern day journalism works.
- pavs 17y agoWhat quality are you expecting? I sincerely challenge anyone to find a story/post/article from TC that is full of technical details that wets your technical palette. Chances are you won't find any. Its really a sham that TC is considered a tech site. If any other site had as much BS posted on HN front page everyday - it would have been flagged & banned in a moment's notice. Yet TC survives and thrives on HN simply because of Arrington's connection. I don't think I would be incorrect to say that the overwhelming TC crowd absolutely hates TC articles or its style of "journalism", yet for the mere fact that you can't "downvote" anything, stupid shit like this clutters the front page.
- revicon 17y ago> I can't believe how TechCrunch is turning into a tech-tabloid. Isn't that all it's ever been anyway? Was there some kind of wow-thats-awesome version of TechCrunch that existed back before I knew about it?
- pclark 17y agoLinode.
- bentlegen 17y agoLinode had several hours of downtime back in October: http://www.linode.com/forums/archive/o_t/t_4778/host_reboots_october_27th_2009.html http://www.linode.com/forums/archive/o_t/t_4778/host_reboots... Not to knock on Linode - I use them - but as earlier commenters have stated, downtime is a fact of life, and no host is immune.
- jmonegro 17y agoTechCrunch ought to get a little green light image in their sidebar that goes red and displays the text "Rackspace is down" every time it is.
- Hoff 17y agoYeah, and followed by a GoogleWave of Erlang threads on HN. Please.
- tybris 17y agoAmazon just started looking a whole lot more attractive. They may not have such fanatical support, but they do know how to fix their stuff.
- cmelbye 17y agoWell, Rackspace knows how to fix their stuff too, which is why it's up again after the problem appeared. ;-)
- strlen 17y agoAttention Internet start-ups: operations is your core competency. You can't just expect to push your application code to "the cloud" and have somebody else make it scalable and fault tolerant. It's fine to use a managed hosting service provider if you're just getting started and paying month-to-month based on credit cards and can't afford networking gear (hardware itself can be leased). However, it shocks me to see venture funded, post-series A start-ups exclusively relying on others to do their operations (including systems administration). Problem with outsourcing your operations to somebody else is that you're outsourcing it to somebody who has zero knowledge of your application and is also responsible for at the very least dozens of other customers. Essentially, rather than developing your own vertical technology team, you're relying on a on horizontal technology team whose resources multiple other companies (including your competitors) are fighting for. That's exactly how poorly run big companies function (multiple engineering teams competing for attention of monothlic operations, SCM, release, QA etc... teams). Well run Internet giants, however, function much differently. If you look at Google's job openings, you can note that they don't hire IT/Systems Administrators (aside from data-center technicians and corporate IT). Instead, they have Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) assigned to specific properties. The SREs are actually engineers who are able to write and debug code and deeply understand the application-specific stack they operate rather than treat it as a black box. Sure, there are great business and technical reasons (edit: it said financial, which I felt was an unfair strawman) reasons to use a managed/"cloud" provider (EC2 and Rackspace cloud are very attractive due to the ability to add/remove nodes as traffic goes up and down, as well as provision machines ad-hoc for analytics tasks/MapReduce) -- but even then, you're not off the hook for operations. It's still your responsibility to ensure that at the very least, there's a "hot standby" disaster recovery site. Yes, it's not easy - but running a successful business isn't supposed to be.