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How is it that Amazon.com is so reliable if there are so many problems with their "cloud" products? Do they not use the same software to run their site?

weavejester 16y ago
I suspect it's because amazon.com has different performance requirements. For instance, I imagine the read/write balance is very different for amazon.com than for reddit.com.
gpapilion 16y ago
If you understand the limitations of the various products you can build a VERY reliable service. The reddit assumption of a single datacenter and single technology to store that data was an engineering failure. They essentially didn't have a disaster recovery plan in place.
- snorkel 16y ago
  I'm sure reddit's engineers are as capable as any for producing a seemless disaster recovery plan, but the most common obstacle to implementing it is cost. Most web services choose the occasional risk of downtime in one data center instead of incurring the cost of being in two data centers at all times.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    Yep. And there's that whole asymptotic cost/complexity curve where as you chase more 9's of perfection, your cost and complexity rises out of proportion to the value you're getting. At the end of the day, no matter how much we might like Reddit, it's still just a website with social discussion forums and link sharing, full of non-essential chatter and pictures of kitties. (Again, I love Reddit, don't get me wrong, but it's far from a Mission Critical resource for any business or person's life.) So achieving perfect reliability & performance is probably not worth the cost/pain.
danielrhodes 16y ago
Amazon.com is not hosted on EC2. It's entirely separate.
- rbranson 16y ago
  This isn't entirely true. Amazon.com uses EC2 in addition to dedicated servers. http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/1516269/Amazoncom-attempts-IT-switch-to-cloud-computing http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/1516269/Amaz...
  - absconditus 16y ago
    "She's the director of IT services for the retail giant, although she has nothing to do with the main website operations"
    - lurker17 16y ago
      http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jennifer-boden/1/86/ba6 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jennifer-boden/1/86/ba6 Unless Amazon has managers named Jen Boden, Jen Boden is a Business and HR director, not IT director.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    If I ran the tech at Amazon, I'd want to reuse as much otherwise internal tooling and software architecture and best practices between EC2 and core Amazon.com as possible. But, have physically separate machines and network zones. Maybe share some of same data center, of course, but that's as far as I'd take it, and even that sounds a little risky.

weavejester 16y ago

I suspect it's because amazon.com has different performance requirements. For instance, I imagine the read/write balance is very different for amazon.com than for reddit.com.

gpapilion 16y ago

If you understand the limitations of the various products you can build a VERY reliable service. The reddit assumption of a single datacenter and single technology to store that data was an engineering failure. They essentially didn't have a disaster recovery plan in place.

snorkel 16y ago
I'm sure reddit's engineers are as capable as any for producing a seemless disaster recovery plan, but the most common obstacle to implementing it is cost. Most web services choose the occasional risk of downtime in one data center instead of incurring the cost of being in two data centers at all times.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  Yep. And there's that whole asymptotic cost/complexity curve where as you chase more 9's of perfection, your cost and complexity rises out of proportion to the value you're getting. At the end of the day, no matter how much we might like Reddit, it's still just a website with social discussion forums and link sharing, full of non-essential chatter and pictures of kitties. (Again, I love Reddit, don't get me wrong, but it's far from a Mission Critical resource for any business or person's life.) So achieving perfect reliability & performance is probably not worth the cost/pain.

danielrhodes 16y ago

Amazon.com is not hosted on EC2. It's entirely separate.

rbranson 16y ago
This isn't entirely true. Amazon.com uses EC2 in addition to dedicated servers. http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/1516269/Amazoncom-attempts-IT-switch-to-cloud-computing http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/1516269/Amaz...
- absconditus 16y ago
  "She's the director of IT services for the retail giant, although she has nothing to do with the main website operations"
  - lurker17 16y ago
    http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jennifer-boden/1/86/ba6 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jennifer-boden/1/86/ba6 Unless Amazon has managers named Jen Boden, Jen Boden is a Business and HR director, not IT director.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  If I ran the tech at Amazon, I'd want to reuse as much otherwise internal tooling and software architecture and best practices between EC2 and core Amazon.com as possible. But, have physically separate machines and network zones. Maybe share some of same data center, of course, but that's as far as I'd take it, and even that sounds a little risky.