4 ms·

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 m

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
  - deanCommie 3y ago
    That link says "Google designs zones to minimize the risk of correlated failures caused by physical infrastructure outages like power, cooling, or networking. Thus, if a zone becomes unavailable, you can transfer traffic to another zone in the same region to keep your services running." Which is clearly false if a single flood can take out an entire region.
- pl4nty 3y ago
  > This is unique compared to Microsoft Azure doesn't guarantee distance between zones, but they aim for 483km. So they can provide better isolation at the cost of higher inter-AZ latency. Depends on the region - you'd need an internal contact (and/or NDA?) to get approx numbers
easton 3y ago
Is this true of AWS? I haven’t read that Wikileaks location document in a while, but I seem to recall in official docs the AZs being placed far enough away from each other to make sure a natural disaster won’t kill a whole region (different flood planes, etc). Of course, you go to Asburn and all the buildings are really close to each other.
inopinatus 3y ago
When AWS is in immediately adjacent buildings, it’s for the same AZ.

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
- deanCommie 3y ago
  That link says "Google designs zones to minimize the risk of correlated failures caused by physical infrastructure outages like power, cooling, or networking. Thus, if a zone becomes unavailable, you can transfer traffic to another zone in the same region to keep your services running." Which is clearly false if a single flood can take out an entire region.
pl4nty 3y ago
> This is unique compared to Microsoft Azure doesn't guarantee distance between zones, but they aim for 483km. So they can provide better isolation at the cost of higher inter-AZ latency. Depends on the region - you'd need an internal contact (and/or NDA?) to get approx numbers

easton 3y ago

Is this true of AWS? I haven’t read that Wikileaks location document in a while, but I seem to recall in official docs the AZs being placed far enough away from each other to make sure a natural disaster won’t kill a whole region (different flood planes, etc). Of course, you go to Asburn and all the buildings are really close to each other.

inopinatus 3y ago

When AWS is in immediately adjacent buildings, it’s for the same AZ.