As reported by CNET News “Lightning took down Amazon Cloud” there was a small outage in the Amazon EC2 infrastructure. The media decided that this is a great reason to run yet another hype story and provide you with a headline that is really misleading. The Amazon Cloud did not go down. The truth of the matter is that a small number of servers in a single location were impacted due to a lighting strike that disabled a power distribution unit.
With this outage, MioWorks.com was not impacted at all. But if it were let’s talk about the beauty of the cloud. One of the main reasons that companies use EC2 is because of its on-demand nature. This means that if your server was in that small cluster that went off line, you can quickly recover and bring it up on another server in an unaffected zone. And if you have your stuff together you can do it in fifteen minutes or less.
At MioWorks we have seen our production instances go offline for one reason or another. When this occurs we take advantage of the cloud. In our environment we always keep a hot spare server running and prepared. In the event of a problem with a single server, we can just make a few configuration changes and within a minute or two the problem is solved. In the case where the hot spare is not available or has been just used, our process takes just a little bit longer. We programatically tell Amazon to give us a new server in an unaffected availability zone, then we load it with our pre-configured Amazon Machine Image. We run a few automated configuration scripts, re-connect to our storage servers and that’s it. In the cloud a full re-connect of a server takes us about 15 minutes from bare metal.
So don’t worry, servers going offline is not new to the cloud, but wow it makes exciting headlines.
