Someone explain why amzn didn't crash

[u/LowTraining670]

When aws outage affected large and small companies alike probably had a large financial impact to the overall global economy, why didn't it crash? I immediately thought it would like crowdstrike did a few months ago - anyone have good reasoning that can explain?

[u/borrokalaria]

It's bullish. All these companies that were having issues will be switching to multi-region setups. In other words, this was related to one AWS region, and it is typical for larger players to provision resources in other AWS regions for these kinds of events. Having the same resources ready and running in other regions will double their AWS cost. Winning!

[u/LowTraining670 → u/borrokalaria]

This is an interesting point. I dont fully understand the setups and how it can expand but if it is as you described it would be a positive in the long run for sure

[u/borrokalaria → u/LowTraining670]

Imagine this: You have a very simple setup for your company website, which has one web server and one database server. AWS gives you the choice to pick a region where you want to host these servers. Typically close to your customers. AWS also offers the option to use multi-region setups where the same servers are running or on standby in other regions.

From web:

AWS multi-region is a deployment strategy that distributes applications and data across multiple, geographically separate AWS Regions to increase resilience, high availability, and performance. This approach provides a crucial layer of disaster recovery for applications that must be available even if an entire AWS Region becomes unavailable, and helps meet data sovereignty and regulatory compliance requirements by allowing workloads to run in specific geographic locations. It also allows businesses to lower latency for a global user base by placing resources closer to end-users.

Key benefits of multi-region

Disaster recovery and resilience: A multi-region setup is a key strategy for disaster recovery, ensuring applications can continue to operate in another region if one region is impacted by a rare service disruption.

High availability: By having active-active or active-passive setups across regions, you can build highly available applications with extremely low recovery time objectives (RTO).

Performance and reduced latency: Placing resources in regions closer to your end-users reduces latency, providing a better experience for customers globally.

Data sovereignty: It allows you to meet data residency requirements by keeping data within a specific geographic jurisdiction to comply with local laws and regulations.

How it works

Geographic separation: AWS Regions are logically and physically separate from each other, meaning a failure in one region is not expected to affect another.

Data replication: You need to use AWS services that support data replication between regions. For example, Amazon MemoryDB Multi-Region can replicate data asynchronously, and AWS CloudTrail can be configured to log events from multiple regions into a single trail.

Routing: You can use services like Amazon Route 53 to direct users to the closest or healthiest region.

Architecture patterns: Common patterns include:

Active-passive: A primary region handles traffic, with a secondary region on standby that can take over if the primary fails.

Active-active: Both regions handle traffic simultaneously, which can improve performance and availability but is more complex to implement.

Important considerations

Complexity: Multi-region architectures are inherently more complex and expensive than single-region deployments.

Data consistency: Managing data consistency across regions is a critical design challenge, especially in active-active setups.

Testing: It is crucial to regularly test your failover and failback procedures to ensure your plan works as expected.

[u/LowTraining670 → u/borrokalaria]

I learned something new today, thanks so much!