Lovely Systems is using Amazons Elastic Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Simple Queue Service (SQS) for business critical applications. yesterday we experienced a outage of the services.

while it’s really bad that our services were down as well. i need to say that it was the first outage within 2 years! that’s awesome.

On the other hand – where is the support hotline? who can we call? who can we mail in case of troubles? My mail to the “Business Development Inquiries” was answered 11hours later…

But nevertheless: Amazon, keep on the good work – we’ll use your services more and more in future.

here’s the official statement from AWS:

Here’s some additional detail about the problem we experienced earlier today.

Early this morning, at 3:30am PST, we started seeing elevated levels of authenticated requests from multiple users in one of our locations. While we carefully monitor our overall request volumes and these remained within normal ranges, we had not been monitoring the proportion of authenticated requests. Importantly, these cryptographic requests consume more resources per call than other request types.

Shortly before 4:00am PST, we began to see several other users significantly increase their volume of authenticated calls. The last of these pushed the authentication service over its maximum capacity before we could complete putting new capacity in place. In addition to processing authenticated requests, the authentication service also performs account validation on every request Amazon S3 handles. This caused Amazon S3 to be unable to process any requests in that location, beginning at 4:31am PST. By 6:48am PST, we had moved enough capacity online to resolve the issue.

As we said earlier today, though we’re proud of our uptime track record over the past two years with this service, any amount of downtime is unacceptable. As part of the post mortem for this event, we have identified a set of short-term actions as well as longer term improvements. We are taking immediate action on the following: (a) improving our monitoring of the proportion of authenticated requests; (b) further increasing our authentication service capacity; and (c) adding additional defensive measures around the authenticated calls. Additionally, we’ve begun work on a service health dashboard, and expect to release that shortly.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team