[Outages-discussion] [outages] Amazon EC2 outage AfterAction Report

[Michael Loftis]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 1:39 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/
>
> Please redirect discissions to -discuss, would you?  Embarassingly, I can't
> make my email client (Zimbra6) add that header, that I know of.

As an Amazon/EC2 customer I felt like I might share my experience of
the outage....

Apparently the one EC2/EBS instance I have was in that last 2% since
mine was effectively down for the entire duration.  This though is
really just the latest issue.  Some weeks ago the Amazon host on which
my EC2 instance was running needed to be shutdown for maintenance,
they let me know, but I was unable to actually shutdown my instance.
I was able to take a snapshot, and start up a new instance, but I was
charged for the time that the old instance was stuck in the "stopping"
state and during which I couldn't do anything at all to it.  It gets
worse because I paid for a reserved instance so my normal costs are
much lower, and I was stuck paying the MUCH higher normal cost of an
instance for many days, without any recourse.  Unless you pay
separately for support you don't even have a way to contact Amazon
about issues with the service, even in cases like that where it was
their issue.

They certainly lacked transparency early on in the outage, and I'm
glad they've learned a LOT from this and are improving their
processes.  But they are constantly having little issues that most
people don't even hear about.  Add to that their "IPv6 doesn't even
exist" attitude and I'm taking my business elsewhere, eating the cost
of the *reserved instance.

*Reserved instances are basically you pre-pay to get a lower per hour
cost.  This makes great sense if you're planning on having an instance
running for the majority of the timeframe for which you pay for the
reserved instance.  It basically locks you into a discounted pricing
for a specific instance type (memory and CPU) for 1 yr or 3 yrs.  I
made my decision some time ago under the thought that "well they will
get their act together and get IPv6 support and improve their firewall
so you can at least get tunnels in and out" and they've done neither,
and as best as I've been able to tell, still have no plans to.