(Real) Storm Crushes Amazon Cloud, Knocks out Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram
Found on Wired on Sunday, 01 July 2012
Amazon tells its customers to plan for this to happen, and to be ready to roll over to a new data center whenever there’s an outage.
According to Twitter messages from Netflix Director of Cloud Architecture Adrian Cockcroft and Instagram Engineer Rick Branson, it looks like an Amazon Elastic Load Balancing service, designed to spread Netflix’s processing loads across data centers, failed during the outage. Without that ELB service working properly, the Netflix and Pintrest services hosted by Amazon crashed.
Friday’s outage wasn’t nearly as severe as the one that took out Amazon in April 2011. Then, a botched network update rolled across several data centers, causing widespread outages on the Amazon cloud.
Outsorcing isn't always the solution to every problem. In most cases, it just adds another SPOF and makes you dependant from another company.