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the "whole" of USE1 very rarely goes down [0], because unlike other cloud providers, Amazon's availability zones are actually independent and decoupled, and if

the "whole" of USE1 very rarely goes down [0], because unlike other cloud providers, Amazon's availability zones are actually independent and decoupled, and if you're running on EC2 in a zonal way it's highly unlikely an outage will affect multiple zones. [0] There are of course exceptions that come once every few years, but most instances people can think of in terms of widespread outages is one specific service going down in a region, creating a cascade of other dependencies. e.g. Lambda or Kinesis going down and impacting some other higher-level service, say, Translate.

asah 3y ago
Am I missing something about us-east-1 reliability ? https://www.google.com/search?q=us-east-1+reliability https://www.google.com/search?q=us-east-1+reliability https://www.google.com/search?q=us-east-1+outage https://www.google.com/search?q=us-east-1+outage
- temp_praneshp 3y ago
  Yes. to put it a bit bluntly, you are using a very generic google search and being blind to nuance. us-east-1 does have more problems than other zones due to a variety of reasons, but it rarely (ie, once a few years) goes down as a whole. As long as you're in several AZs within us-east-1, the impact of most outages should not take you down completely. In the context of the comment you are replying to, your google search links are lazy and fail to see the big picture.
  - asah 3y ago
    thanks - jfyi this was from my personal experience spanning a decade with USE1, but again maybe my experience is out of date, so thanks for the update. (p.s. the use of a google search vs direct results wasn't "lazy" - it's to allow readers to do their own research vs pasting one result and then getting accused of bias)
oceanplexian 3y ago
AZs are buildings often times right next to each other on the same street. People who think this is a great failure domain for your entire business are deeply misguided. All it takes is a hurricane, a truck hitting a pole, a fire, or any number of extremely common situations and infra will be wiped off the map. Build stuff to be properly multi-region.
- deanCommie 3y ago
  > AZs are buildings often times right next to each other on the same street. Not at AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regio... > An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region. AZs give customers the ability to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center. All AZs in an AWS Region are interconnected with high-bandwidth, low-latency networking, over fully redundant, dedicated metro fiber providing high-throughput, low-latency networking between AZs. All traffic between AZs is encrypted. The network performance is sufficient to accomplish synchronous replication between AZs. AZs make partitioning applications for high availability easy. If an application is partitioned across AZs, companies are better isolated and protected from issues such as power outages, lightning strikes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and more. AZs are physically separated by a meaningful distance, many kilometers, from any other AZ, although all are within 100 km (60 miles) of each other. This is unique compared to Microsoft, and Google (a single flood taking out multiple AZ's? Uh oh: https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/26/google_cloud_outage/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/26/google_cloud_outage/) Sure, a massive earthquake or a nuclear strike could probably take out several.
  - esprehn 3y ago
    GCPs concept of Regions and Zones is different from AWS. For the same level of physical isolation as an AWS AZ you have to use different GCP Regions. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones

asah 3y ago

Am I missing something about us-east-1 reliability ? https://www.google.com/search?q=us-east-1+reliability https://www.google.com/search?q=us-east-1+reliability https://www.google.com/search?q=us-east-1+outage https://www.google.com/search?q=us-east-1+outage

temp_praneshp 3y ago
Yes. to put it a bit bluntly, you are using a very generic google search and being blind to nuance. us-east-1 does have more problems than other zones due to a variety of reasons, but it rarely (ie, once a few years) goes down as a whole. As long as you're in several AZs within us-east-1, the impact of most outages should not take you down completely. In the context of the comment you are replying to, your google search links are lazy and fail to see the big picture.
- asah 3y ago
  thanks - jfyi this was from my personal experience spanning a decade with USE1, but again maybe my experience is out of date, so thanks for the update. (p.s. the use of a google search vs direct results wasn't "lazy" - it's to allow readers to do their own research vs pasting one result and then getting accused of bias)

oceanplexian 3y ago

AZs are buildings often times right next to each other on the same street. People who think this is a great failure domain for your entire business are deeply misguided. All it takes is a hurricane, a truck hitting a pole, a fire, or any number of extremely common situations and infra will be wiped off the map. Build stuff to be properly multi-region.

deanCommie 3y ago
> AZs are buildings often times right next to each other on the same street. Not at AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regio... > An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region. AZs give customers the ability to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center. All AZs in an AWS Region are interconnected with high-bandwidth, low-latency networking, over fully redundant, dedicated metro fiber providing high-throughput, low-latency networking between AZs. All traffic between AZs is encrypted. The network performance is sufficient to accomplish synchronous replication between AZs. AZs make partitioning applications for high availability easy. If an application is partitioned across AZs, companies are better isolated and protected from issues such as power outages, lightning strikes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and more. AZs are physically separated by a meaningful distance, many kilometers, from any other AZ, although all are within 100 km (60 miles) of each other. This is unique compared to Microsoft, and Google (a single flood taking out multiple AZ's? Uh oh: https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/26/google_cloud_outage/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/26/google_cloud_outage/) Sure, a massive earthquake or a nuclear strike could probably take out several.
- esprehn 3y ago
  GCPs concept of Regions and Zones is different from AWS. For the same level of physical isolation as an AWS AZ you have to use different GCP Regions. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones