Why did AWS Support fail with US-EAST-1 again? (2024)

FAQs

What caused AWS to go down? ›

AWS outage causes: Internal issues

As AWS describes it, this “triggered an unexpected behavior from a large number of clients inside the internal network”. Basically, AWS unintentionally triggered a Distributed Denial of Service (or DDoS attack) on their own internal network.

September 20, 2015: Amazon's DynamoDB Outage

In September 2015, AWS's US-East region experienced a brief network disruption impacting its NoSQL database service, DynamoDB. As a result, some of the internet's biggest sites and cloud services were made unavailable.

AWS narrowed down the root cause to be an issue with a subsystem responsible for capacity management for AWS Lambda, which caused errors directly for customers (including those using an API Gateway) and indirectly through other AWS services.

US-EAST-1 is Amazon's oldest region, dating its genesis all the way to 2006. In theory, it is the cloud colossus's most resilient region, as it boasts six availability zones and 10 local zones.

The law of large numbers will naturally slow down its growth rate over time, but AWS has felt headwinds from optimization efforts and variable declines amongst customers. Again, this is a good thing - it means AWS can participate in the downside and the upside as consumption patterns change.

No major cloud service provider is willing to take the risk of opening a region in Russia because of security reasons. There's no way anyone can guarantee that the russian security services will not simply barge in at gunpoint and tamper with or try to hook into the platform infrastructure directly.

0:00:00. N. Virginia emerged as the most unreliable AWS Region, topping the list with a total of 23 partial outages in 2022, which collectively lasted for 61 hours and 7 minutes.

If one availability zone fails, your application can continue to run in another availability zone without any interruption. However, if the entire region fails, your application will fail.

To speed up AWS Lambda performance, focus on reducing cold starts. Cold starts can slow things down by making functions take longer to start running. When you minimize cold starts, you ensure your functions are ready immediately.

Limited Control. With AWS Lambda, control is another issue that deters teams. Since Lambda functions run on Amazon Machine Instances, they use industry-standard tools for development. Teams do not have the freedom to custom install packages or software on the running environment.

Why is it called AWS Lambda? ›

If you're unfamiliar with Lambda, it's what has been termed a "serverless" computing service from AWS, which uses events to drive resource allocation and computation. Lambda is named after functions from lambda calculus and programming. Those functions act as a good analogy for the service.

Cloud front is a global CDN but it is managed from the global region of us-east-1.

Leading government agencies around the world use AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster. The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract enables AWS to continue providing Department of Defense (DoD) customers with secure, reliable, and mission-critical cloud services.

The GSS AWS boundary contains all servers and devices that are directly managed by the IRS. This includes the operating system, middleware, and database management systems hosting IRS applications.

In explaining why AWS had decided to make the staff cuts, a spokesperson stated: “We've identified a few targeted areas of the organization we need to streamline. These decisions are difficult but necessary as we continue to invest, hire, and optimize resources to deliver innovation for our customers.

Aside from Amazon and thousands of other AWS web sites going down, there would be a mad scramble to restore the servers. It's much more likely that one data center would go down, so web sites that have replicated across multiple data centers would not be affected much, if at all.

Amazon Web Services, March 2017, $150 – $160 million

According to a report by Axios, the AWS downtime could have incurred losses of $150 and $160 million for the S&P 500 and financial services companies affected.

So to give you a direct answer, no Amazon wouldn't be profitable as of now without AWS. it took Amazon more than 14 years—58 quarters after its May 1997 initial public offering—to make, cumulatively, as much profit as it produced in the latest quarter alone.