S3 – RW_Jordan@Cork.Ireland

The recent hysteria about the massive and unfortunate AWS outage in US-EAST-1 and their S2 storage issues. Has raised the discussion about the vulnerability of the Internet. First lets be clear here, the Internet is NOT services like Amazon, or Google, or Dropbox, or any one of thousands of ‘Sites’ ON the internet. The Internet did not fail during the AWS outage, Sites on the Internet were offline, as in, “not on the Internet”, or at best unavailable as a facility there on.

The internet is a web, which can be fragile, but is mostly fairly resilient to most things, including facilities being disabled, or unavailable. So when you listen to talk about ‘LOSING the INTERNET’ take it with a grain of salt. It’s probably more about loosing connectivity with someones favorite destination on the Internet, facebook, Netflix whatever and less likely about the Internet actually being down.

Well, I’ve worked myself out of another job, mostly, as I assisted the current company into the Amazon cloud. They were operating their system from a hosting environment, so they were mostly in the ‘Cloud’ anyway. And as you might guess I dislike the whole ‘Cloud’ hype as it’s mostly a marketing term. So what I convinced them to do, is improve their scalability by moving the server into the equivalent systems in the Amazon ‘hosting’ environment.

As part of the exercise the database from move from a MySQL database on Windows server, to the Amazon RDS the the webserver/application servers (windows) to EC2 instances, with additional storage in the Amazon S3 facility.

The process was, as usual, a learning experience, and Amazon still has issues with their interfaces to their corner of the Cloud. But it all works, I managed to defrag the database, and apply more indexing and SQL revisions to the point that it runs so smoothly, they don’t need me anymore. Hence the working myself out of a job. Amazon should hire me to sell their services.

Tag: S3

What constitutes the Internet