Cloud computing gone bad? Amazon servers down...

[johnspack]

I'm rather annoyed, my ROF sim got taken down as well because of this. It's being blamed on hackers, and cloud computing in general. I'm not sure which, but it's really annoying to me, as a sim I've invested a lot of money and time into is unusable because of this.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/atlantic/201...nesscloud36892
http://www.bnet.com/blog/technology-...s-web-00/10157
Any thoughts on this?

[Kreij]

Personally, I think the "cloud" is a disaster just waiting to happen.

[hellrazor]

Everybody! Put all your eggs in one basket that likely never gets updated!

[FordGT90Concept]

Same. The only reason why businesses like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are pushing it is because it gives them information about you and information is power. I like to keep all my data local, secure, and with multiple backups, thank you very much.

[streetfighter 2]

What's "ROF sim"?

Originally Posted by Kreij

Personally, I think the "cloud" is a disaster just waiting to happen.

It's always sounded that way to me . . . On the other hand I was under the impression that the "cloud" is supposed to negate SPOF with various failsafe mechanisms (such as failover).

I'm disappointed that EC2 went down like dominoes.

[Kreij]

I guess my question in this case would be, "Where is the "cloud" redundancy?"
If Amazon's Virginia site went down, why wasn't all traffic immediately rerouted to another cloud location where the data was replicated in real time?

It's not being replicated? Nice, that's network management 101 stuff.

If I was a cloud customer who is paying for terabytes of data to be available to my customers and it became unavailable, I would be .. well .. perturbed.

@SF2 : ROF is Rise Of Flight.

[johnspack]

Man, it's still down. I just bought a plane, and someone gifted me one, which I haven't even seen yet. We are trying to finance the next major patch to our sim engine. This hacker crap has just destroyed $1000s of effort on our part. What crap.

[95Viper]

Looks like Storm Clouds for Amazon today...

Amazon’s Cloud Crashed Overnight, And Brought Several Other Companies Down Too
Status page: http://status.aws.amazon.com/

[Goodman]

Cloud computing gone bad?

Was it ever anything different?

[bostonbuddy]

the cloud always seemed like a scam so the companies could make more money.

[Funtoss]

what is cloud computing? O_o

[micropage7]

Originally Posted by Funtoss

what is cloud computing? O_o

please read this

cloud is pretty nice concept that said you can access your data no matter where you are and what device you are on
but for today i guess theres alot that need to do from traffic, apps, security and so
maybe in the future we could, but for today i guess its still need a long way to go

[Easy Rhino]

It was only a matter of time before we saw this. I wonder how this will effect IBM and Intel's sales.

[W1zzard]

Originally Posted by Easy Rhino

It was only a matter of time before we saw this. I wonder how this will effect IBM and Intel's sales.

if people stop using the cloud [for hosting], many of them will use dedicated servers, which means installed server count goes up

[johnspack]

Well, the ROF master game server is back up thank god, and so is the store. 777 Studios was having a big sale as Easter weekend is their biggest selling time of the year. They lost a load of money on this. They count on the revenue to continue building up the game engine, and we are waiting for some really cool new features expected in the next patch. This really screwed a lot of people....
Edit: our main forum is still down however.

[Kreij]

Originally Posted by W1zzard

if people stop using the cloud [for hosting], many of them will use dedicated servers, which means installed server count goes up

True .. unless the hosting companies are renting space in the cloud for the data so they do not have to manage their own infrastructure.
Best to ask if your hosting company is using their own servers for the hosting services.

[CJCerny]

I understand the frustration, but I think the frustration or fear of cloud computing is totally unmerited. You're an idiot if you think any system ever devised by man is infallible. You have to allow for downtime, both planned and unplanned, whether it be for cloud computing or for that shiny new Camaro you just bought--there is going to come a time when it just won't work when you need it to.

At the company where I work, we rely on LogMeIn to remotely control and diagnose the machines in our customer base. This past Sunday, they made some kind of backend change to their product that completely killed off our ability to control about 1800 machines remotely. It's not evil or the fault of the "cloud". It just happens.

[Frick]

Meh, this stuff can happen without the help of cloud computing anyway, so I don't think it's the fault of the Cloud. I like the cload as a concept.

[Easy Rhino]

The cloud concept is great for saving power and money, but as we just saw, if the system goes down IT ALL GOES DOWN. so where amazon was offering money savings through some redundancy they may have to add even more now negating any big saving.

[Kreij]

Originally Posted by CJCerny

It's not evil or the fault of the "cloud". It just happens.

You're right. Unplanned outages can occur.
I'll remember to tell my customers that due to a unforseen consequence and the fact that I failed to set up an adequate contigency plan to even give them partial service in the event of a catastrophic failure, that, "Hey ... shit happens."

I'm sure they'll be understanding and quite forgiving.

[johnspack]

Heh, yeah I use logmein as well to remotely control a server on the us east coast. It's a paid job, not good pay, but it's work. If logmein went down, I've have a very serious problem....

[FordGT90Concept]

From the mouth of the lion: Amazon S3 Availability Event: July 20, 2008

And the single point of failure that brought the whole thing down was corrupt bits in non-errorchecking environment (it is now). The servers were giving incorrect information to each other so the other servers were trying to compensate for it. Eventually, the whole network of systems was bogged down by bogus overhead.

It was a programming error.

Originally Posted by Easy Rhino

The cloud concept is great for saving power and money, but as we just saw, if the system goes down IT ALL GOES DOWN. so where amazon was offering money savings through some redundancy they may have to add even more now negating any big saving.

It doesn't all go down 99.7% of the time. That only happens when there is a failure in inter-server communication which is quite rare.

[Easy Rhino]

I understand how servers work. This crash was completely unacceptable. If you build up an entire server cloud system around "reliability, efficiency and flexibility" then it should never ever go down like that. There should have been checks in place or some kind of policy that requires the admins to check for irregular activity. That could not have possibly gone unnoticed for long but who knows...

[FordGT90Concept]

It was like a virus. Once the problem took hold, it spread. The only way to stop it was to reboot the entire cloud. It shares a lot in common with that Northeast Corridor power failure in 2000 (I think). One transformer/database went down and the rest responded as they were programmed to but, instead of isolating the issue in both cases, they magnified it.

You can't blame them for being human.

[Easy Rhino]

oh i dont blame anyone. and i like cloud technology. but if amazon thinks that their cloud business will one day bring in more revenue for them than sales on amazon.com (which is what their ceo says they want) then they better start adding redundancy and people better get used to paying a little bit more for it.