Another minor bump

Anyone based in the US East region in AWS knows that yet again there were issues with EBS volumes, although you wouldn’t know it if you looked at their website. It’s a bit of a joke when you see headlines like Amazon outage takes down Reddit, Foursquare, others yet on their status page a tiny little note icon appears that states there’s a slight issue, extremely minor, don’t worry about it. Yeah right.

The main culprits were EC2 and the API, both of which were EBS related.

“Degraded EBS performance in a single Availability Zone
10:38 AM PDT We are currently investigating degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.
11:11 AM PDT We can confirm degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. Instances using affected EBS volumes will also experience degraded performance.
11:26 AM PDT We are currently experiencing degraded performance for EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. New launches for EBS backed instances are failing and instances using affected EBS volumes will experience degraded performance.
12:32 PM PDT We are working on recovering the impacted EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.
1:02 PM PDT We continue to work to resolve the issue affecting EBS volumes in a single availability zone in the US-EAST-1 region. The AWS Management Console for EC2 indicates which availability zone is impaired. “

The actual message is much much longer but you get the gist, a small number of people were affected. Yet most of the major websites that use amazon were affected, how can that be considered small?

Either way, this time we survived, and we survived because we learnt. Back in June and July we experienced these issues with EBS so we did something about it, now why didn’t everyone else?

How Alfresco Cloud Survived

So back in June and July we were heavily reliant on EBS just like everyone else, we had an EBS backed AMI that we then used puppet to build out the OS, this is pretty much what everyone does and this is why everyone was affected, back then we probably had 100 – 150 EBS volumes so the likely hood of one of them going funny was quite high, now we have about 18, and as soon as we can we will ditch those as well.

After being hit twice in relatively quick succession we realised we had a choice, be lazy or be crazy, we went for crazy and now it paid out. We could have been lazy and just said that Amazon had issues and it wasn’t that frequent and it is not likely to happen again, or we could be crazy and reduce all of our EBS usage as much as possible, we did that.

Over the last few months I’ve added a numer or posts about The Cloud, Amazon and Architecting for the cloud along with a few funky Abnormal puppet set ups and oddities in the middle. All of this was spawned from the EBS outages, we had to be crazy, Amazon tell us all the time don’t have state, don’t rely on anything other than failure use multiple AZ’s etc etc all of those big players that were affected would have been told that they should use multiple availability zones, but as I pointed out Here their AZ can’t be fully independent and yet again this outage proves it.

Now up until those outages we had done all of that, but we still trusted Amazon to remain operational, since July we have made a concerted effort to move our infrastructure to elements within Amazon that are more stable, hence the removal of EBS. We now only deploy instance backed EC2 nodes which means we have no ability to restart a server, but it also means that we can build them quickly and consistently.

We possibly took it to the extreme, our base AMI, now instance backed, consists of a single file that does a git checkout, once it has done that it simply builds its self to the point that chef and puppet can take over and run. The tools used to do this are many but needless to say many hundreds of of lines of bash, supported by Ruby, Java, Go and any number of other languages or tools.

We combined this with fully distributing puppet so it runs locally, in theory once a box is built it is there for the long run; we externalised all of the configuration so puppet was simpler and easier to maintain. Puppet, its config, the Base OS, the tools to manage and maintain the systems are all pulled from remote services including our DNS which automatically updates its self based on a set of tags.

Summary

So, how did we survive, we decided every box was not important, if some crazy person can not randomly delete a box or service and the system keeps working then we had failed. I can only imagine that the bigger companies with a lot more money and people and time looking at this are still treating Amazon more as a datacentre rather than a collection of web services that may or may not work. With the distributed puppet and config once our servers are built they run happily on a local copy of the data, no network, and that is important because AWS’s network is not always reliable and nor is their data access. If a box no longer works delete it, if an environment stops working rebuild it; if amazon has a glitch, keep working, simple.