Amazon web services back up and running
But reasons for outage still being investigated
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Amazon has finally resolved the lingering issues from the outage last weekend, but the root cause of the power failure has yet to be determined by energy provider ESB Networks.
The web giant said at the time that lightning had struck a transformer in Dublin on Sunday, which knocked out all power provision including the back-up generator.
But exploration of the problem by ESB ruled this out, a spokesman at the Irish firm told The Register.
"Investigations are ongoing but we still don't know the official cause," said the ESB man. "We know that it was a transformer fault, a transformer blew."
He said it was not dismissing Amazon's claims of lightning, as reported yesterday, which the web player made on its services health dashboard hours after the incident.
At 3.01pm PDT Amazon said: "We understand at this point that a lightning strike hit a transformer from a utility provider to one of our Availability Zones in Dublin, sparking an explosion and fire."
A spokeswoman at Amazon said ESB had made the "initial assessment that the cause of the power outage was lightning. Amazon and ESB have been on close contact to understand the root cause of the power event in question".
She added: "As often occurs during investigations like this, root cause is not always what it first appears to be."
The firm is reporting that web services are operating normally today. ®
COMMENTS
am i missing something?
Is Amazon running their datacenter off of an extension cord plugged into a neighborig building? I can't see any reason a single exploding pole-pig could take down a data center.
This continuous need to design in your own resilience.
Even with the advances in technology which are touted in the cloud, we still need to think long and hard on making our sites resilient. The best means of being resilient would be to have a site which is hosted from multiple cloud providers, which is possible but also expensive. There's also the issue of the differing services and means of accessing them between the different providers, there's no standards here yet, so you must write different provisioning scripts for both or buy someone's middleware software (I'm a fan of do-it-yourself and free software). Perhaps we'll see some standards emerge over the next few years, at least amongst similar types of cloud platforms, such as the infrastructure clouds such as Amazon's AWS and rackspace. Don't hold your breath though! I have been exploring the use of Amazon AWS for hosting a website and have posted advice and free scripts at http://www.practicalclouds.com
I guess
Both redundant rings inside the DC took a power feed from the same sub-station, assuming 2x PSU per node as the usual design for DCs.
Not sure about UPS - they normally run on Diesel with capacity for a week or 2.
Seems a bit iffy.
As with all hosting suppliers or telco feeds, EAST/ WEST is the usual game with diverse suppliers and fibre paths in different trays.
I always ask for the blueprints first.
But like they say - either they don't know the root cause, yet or are stalling until they can come up with something creative. All the best lies are founded in truth.
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