Comments on: The bigger they are, the harder they fall http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2011/04/25/the-bigger-they-are-the-harder-they-fall/ Stay curious! Fri, 10 May 2013 18:25:19 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: awksedgreep http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2011/04/25/the-bigger-they-are-the-harder-they-fall/#comment-19362 awksedgreep Thu, 12 May 2011 02:32:17 +0000 http://www.xaprb.com/blog/?p=2301#comment-19362 “Just wait . . . if you can grow them big enough they’ll eventually be too big to fail. Then we won’t have to worry about downtime. The best solution for a broken basket is to put more eggs in it.”

- Ben Bernanke, Sys Admin for Amazon

]]> By: Xaprb http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2011/04/25/the-bigger-they-are-the-harder-they-fall/#comment-19317 Xaprb Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:11:29 +0000 http://www.xaprb.com/blog/?p=2301#comment-19317 From http://blog.mongodb.org/post/4982676520: “If instead the entire east coast region were lost, then you would still have a ful copy of data on C. If you decided that you were going to make the west coast your primary data center for the duration, you would just bring up a couple more nodes there, and make a new replica set with the data from C.”

The word “just” is the wishful thinking I’m talking about in this post. It assumes infinite capacity.

]]> By: Xaprb http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2011/04/25/the-bigger-they-are-the-harder-they-fall/#comment-19312 Xaprb Mon, 25 Apr 2011 23:01:10 +0000 http://www.xaprb.com/blog/?p=2301#comment-19312 I have no inside knowledge of AWS, but from the outside I think I can see that there is not much reserve capacity, at least in certain regions. One commenter on http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/04/the-aws-outage-the-clouds-shining-moment.html spoke of the impact from people moving services to other regions. The lack of reserve capacity is probably part of where the economy of scale comes from.

Someone inside AWS is probably wanting to slap me right now for my stupid speculation about things I’m not qualified to talk about, so please ignore me.

]]> By: Tim McCormack http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2011/04/25/the-bigger-they-are-the-harder-they-fall/#comment-19309 Tim McCormack Mon, 25 Apr 2011 20:03:54 +0000 http://www.xaprb.com/blog/?p=2301#comment-19309 I suppose over-optimization of resource allocation is also at fault, here — AWS almost certainly doesn’t have something analogous to the reserved capacity of the POTS.

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