Amazon Web Services goes down, takes out some Web 2.0 sites, but not the sites that I was running on EC2. I got a shock when I got a Google alert that had news items about Amazon Web Services are down, I immediately went over to all of the sites I’m responsible for, but all of them were live and kicking. So the next stop was checking my mails, and sure there were mails of the cron job to do the backups failing.
I was using duplicity to backup complete file system of the EC2 instances, I have blogged about my approach in Amazon EC2 with rock solid persistent storage. I had the cron job failing during the S3 downtime, but I was serving all requests without a hitch.
I suspect the sites that went down were using PersistenceFS. Reading there documentation, they assume that S3 is going to be available at all times dispite the 99.99% uptime guarantee. That is a major design flaw. Also it is a utter waste of large storage provided in EC2 during the runtime.
I’m glad to say that despite the S3 downtime all my sites were running. I think the sites that went down reconsider their setup. Also I strongly recommend running redundant EC2 instances for any one planning on hosting sites.