How elastic is the elastic really? Amazon Web Services went down again
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We at C2Call are big fans of Amazon web services. To manage millions of users and millions of calls would not have been possible without cloud hosting. Our Video calling launch was very well received and AWS took thousands of additional calls without any performance issues. Our Video calling service is based on our Peer-to-peer technology but there are cases with additional server load for the initial call phase where we establish the P2P connection and for the multi party Video conferencing that we will launch soon.
Status History of AWS EU-West-1
Having said this, it it the second time we have been hit hard by Amazon services outages and I watch the AWS service dashboard with the same fear as the stock market. One shock after another. First Amazon EC2 in Ireland went down and took our corporate email server with it. They manage to damage the database as well…This was Sunday and Amazon is still working on the recovery. Ouch! The updates provided by Amazon do not provide an easy reading, same as our first outage. Is basically the same story “We were prepared but it did not work when put to the test“
Status History of AWS 8th August
Then, ECS on North Virgina went down. Our quality management tool picked this up before Amazon noticed and we can not loose North Virginia as most of our US traffic is managed from there. Luckily, AWS could recover before we had to shift the instances across the country to California. This time the service was impacted only for 15 minutes or so but for me, the incidents took the concept of “elastic” to another test and there is no clear winner.
I really hope Amazon goes back and works on its back up solutions, It is a great service but these interruptions that can last for days are serious.
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No doubt, Amazon is providing great services but these interruptions that can last for days are serious. That can ruin their image as well.
It is really an epic excuse that we were prepared but it did not work when put to the test. They must consider the communities depending upon their services.