Comments on: Setting up a fault-tolerant site using Amazon’s Availability Zones http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/ Cloud Management News & Conversations Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:49:37 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Amazon EC2 Outage Casts Major Doubts on Cloud Technology http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-2772 Wed, 01 Jun 2011 22:30:00 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-2772 [...] outage, we can see that this was indeed not the case. Because of the nature of the errors, multiple availability zones were out of commission, something that users and Amazon themselves have not encountered before, [...]

]]> By: KEY ON IT » BAD WEEK FOR THE CLOUD http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-2614 Tue, 03 May 2011 19:31:38 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-2614 [...] of being almost crash proof.  But it wasn’t.  Even companies running dual instances in separate availability zones in different EC2 data centers could have suffered from the outage.  Clearly the Cloud is still not [...]

]]> By: Amazon problemi ai Server : Down Reddit, Friend Feed | Evilripper Blog http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-2549 Fri, 22 Apr 2011 11:09:13 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-2549 [...] Molto probabilmente la colpa di Amazon è stata solo quella di dei down di alcuni nodi, la gestione di ridondanza la deve fare chi si appoggia al servizio evidentemente Quora, friendfeed non hanno gestito (o forse [...]

]]> By: Amazon EC2 Gets It Right « Brian Berliner's Brain http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-1520 Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:46:19 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-1520 [...] The guys at RightScale have described Setting up a fault-tolerant site using Amazon’s Availability Zones. [...]

]]> By: Nitin http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-511 Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:35:17 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-511 Denny, I completely agree with you. But Thorsten also has a point. If you think about web 2.0 apps, then they are not mission critical in a way that a banking, trading, shipping applications etc. are. Then you have the second aspect that many web 2.0 apps are written by guys that do not really understand complex concepts that you describe and just want to be able to restart an application without too much work in a few minutes when an incident happens. For your average PHP developer your comment sounds like Chinese (assuming a non Chinese speaker PHP developer :) .
If you really want 5 9s EC2 may not be a good starting point to begin with. Just the lack of IP load balancing is probably a reason to stop looking (GoGrid, on the other hand may be worth looking at in that case, or a combination of GoGrid servers and your own database/back end machines in the same data center, but I have no idea about their physical location abilities).

Nonetheless, we should use the right terminology, since there are some engineers out there that understand it and do more than facebook apps ;)

]]> By: Adah http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-503 Wed, 22 Oct 2008 06:35:41 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-503 Well written article.

]]> By: Denny Lane http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-437 Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:06:31 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-437 Thorsten, this is a discussion that can take on a life of its own. I hear what you are saying, but would like to explore a bit more. I would suggest that availability is really the relative concept here, and that fault tolerance is widely assumed to provide the best availability. As for relative concepts, how about “really big bucks”? :-) Cost and complexity do rise with every added nine but mostly when the discussion is about the infrastructure and all that goes into managing it for continuous availability. Not so much when the discussion is just about servers. Yes, there is a premium to pay for 5 9s servers compared to lesser solutions. However hardware prices begin around $12K, which can be quite attractive for applications that are not quite up to the mission-critical level, but important nevertheless. Given a choice, most users would like uninterrupted access to services all the time, mission-critical or not. Enterprise-class servers do go up as high as $60-65K, but that’s a far cry from the hundreds of thousands for proprietary systems of old. As for complexity, a fault-tolerant server is no more complex to deploy, manage and maintain than a single x86 server. These aren’t clusters. Applications run out of the box, and the servers are designed to pretty much care for their own health. It is our contention that for true server fault tolerance, three things are necessary … lock-step hardware, failsafe software and bullet-proof service. But, back to cloud-computing … it all eventually gets back to a physical infrastructure. Outsourced or internal, I believe there is an expectation of service from the user(s) accessing the cloud. That’s a pretty critical situation.

]]> By: Thorsten http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-369 Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:44:56 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-369 Denny, I certainly understand the difference and you are correct. As you know probably better than me there’s a big multiplier factor in cost and complexity for every ’9′ added. As a result there are lots of solutions that address different levels of fault tolerance and price. Yours tends to score high on both aspects :-) . The term “fault tolerance” is actually pretty nice, it’s about tolerance: what can your business/application tolerate? If you can’t tolerate a single missed database update then you better fork out the really big bucks. The vast majority of business applications seem not to fall into that category. Fault-tolerance really is a relative concept…

]]> By: Denny Lane http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-365 Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:24:25 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-365 As you posit, the power of the cloud is mind-boggling. And, your config scenarios as well articulated. I offer only one clarification. These scenarios are not fault tolerant. Restarts, transaction losses, rapidly reconstructing services … these and similar qualifiers happen in fail over solutions. High availability, definitely yes. Fault tolerant, definitely no. Starting at five nines and going up from there, true fault tolerance is failure prevention, no downtime, no data loss, no restarts. Call us (Stratus Technologies) sensitive, but after three decades specializing in fault tolerant technology and preventing downtime of mission-critical applications, we feel a clear distinction is … well, critical.

]]> By: Amazon Web Services Management tools/services « You’re a smart guy, figure it out! http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-310 Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:33:38 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-310 [...] Good article: http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zo... [...]

]]> By: links for 2008-04-16 « Donghai Ma http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-135 Wed, 16 Apr 2008 04:30:39 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-135 [...] Setting up a fault-tolerant site using Amazon’s Availability Zones « RightScale Blog (tags: ec2 amazon aws scaling infrastructure architecture distributed loadbalancing networking scalability) [...]

]]> By: links for 2008-04-04 « Amy G. Dala http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-62 Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:30:35 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-62 [...] Setting up a fault-tolerant site using Amazon’s Availability Zones « RightScale Blog (tags: ec2 amazon scalability cloud_computing) [...]

]]> By: noname http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-45 Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:10:54 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-45 Thank you for this blog posting. Very informative.

]]> By: Amazon finally gets static IPs | Yousef Ourabi http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-44 Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:28:00 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-44 [...] in Ruby on Rails) to Amazons infastructure has a good blog post on the new changes here: “Setting up a fault tolerant site using amazons availability zones“. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web [...]

]]> By: TvE http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-37 Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:15:13 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-37 bd_: I just looked at the EC2 pricing at http://aws.amazon.com/ec and I can’t follow your argument. It says “Regional Data Transfer — $0.01 per GB in/out – all data transferred between instances in different Availability Zones in the same region.”

]]> By: TvE http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-36 Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:06:11 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-36 Kent: thanks for the nice words! I hadn’t noticed Werner’s blog entry, thanks for pointing it out.

bd_: Ahhhh, very good point, I had completely misread that. I better update the blog post, although I think I’m still confused about the pricing. Sounds like a good AWS forum topic.

]]> By: bd_ http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-34 Fri, 28 Mar 2008 05:19:57 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-34 Slight correction: The $0.01/GB charge seems to be for bandwidth crossing /region/ boundraries, not /zone/ boundraries. And currently everything’s in the us-east region, so you won’t actually hit the $0.01/GB charge.

]]> By: Top Posts « WordPress.com http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-33 Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:01:52 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-33 [...] Setting up a fault-tolerant site using Amazon’s Availability Zones Amazon’s Availability Zones are a fabulous new feature that allows users to assign instances to locations that […] [...]

]]> By: Kent Langley http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-31 Thu, 27 Mar 2008 23:39:05 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-31 Great Article! Thank you for laying it all out so clearly. You got a nice plug for these blog entries on the AWS CTO’s blog too. :)

Kent

]]> By: Amazon adds new features to EC2 | HighEdWebTech http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using-amazons-availability-zones/#comment-27 Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:45:04 +0000 http://rightscale.wordpress.com/?p=48#comment-27 [...] has also posted some tutorials on how to use the new features, including how to set up a fault-tolerant site. Written by: Mike | March 27, 2008 | Filed Under Amazon [...]

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