Amazon Web Services outage
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or beat on the side of it
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HandsonFire
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Most County permitting portals are down in NC. Kind of sucks.
You can opt to run in one of their other regions, but AWS 'global services' are dependent on us-east-1And this is is just ONE of AWS's regional centers. It's the Northern Virginia center which is having trouble.
AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane
Analysis: Too many services depend not just on one cloud provider, but on one location
How could this happen? Amazon has a global footprint, and its infrastructure is split into regions, physical locations with a cluster of datacenters. Each region consists of a minimum of three isolated and physically separate availability zones (AZ), each with independent power and connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.
Customers are encouraged to design their applications and services to run in multiple AZs to avoid being taken down by a failure in one of them.
Sadly, it seems that the entire edifice has an Achilles heel that can cause problems regardless of how much redundancy you design into your cloud-based operations, at least according to the experts we asked.
"The issue with AWS is that US East is the home of the common control plane for all of AWS locations except the federal government and European Sovereign Cloud. There was an issue some years ago when the problem was related to management of S3 policies that was felt globally," Omdia Chief Analyst Roy Illsley told us.
He explained that US-EAST-1 can cause global issues because many users and services default to using it since it was the first AWS region, even if they are in a different part of the world.
Certain "global" AWS services or features are run from US-EAST-1 and are dependent on its endpoints, and this includes DynamoDB Global Tables and the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN), Illsley added.
Sid Nag, president and chief research officer for Tekonyx, agreed.
"Although the impacted region is in the AWS US East region, many global services (including those used in Europe) depend on infrastructure or control-plane / cross-region features located in US-EAST-1. This means that even if the European region was unaffected in terms of its own availability zones, dependencies could still cause knock-on impact," he said.
"Some AWS features (for example global account-management, IAM, some control APIs, or even replication endpoints) are served from US-EAST-1, even if you're running workloads in Europe. If those services go down or become very slow, even European workloads may be impacted," he added.
