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Comment by Ysx | Hacker News Reader

Frustration is understandable, though reliance on a single AZ is a known and well-documented failure mode. You have to share the blame.

http://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS_Well-Ar...

"Best practices: Multi-AZ / Region. Distribute application load across multiple Availability Zones / Regions"

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This article was NOT about reliance on a single AZ. That was not the point as we use three AZs in most AWS region, and at least two in every region. The point was simply that an entire AZ was down and Amazon continued to report the entire region as completely healthy throughout.

So this is a AWS architecture guide that on page 55 (of 77) has a bullet point pertaining to applications with high-availanbilty requirements, mentioning that you can increase availability by going multi-AZ.

This is pretty far from AWS clearly communicating from the outset that a single AZ would be generally poor practice or have poorer availability than a server in a normal datacenter.

No idea why this is being downvoted. If a single AZ goes down and your app goes with it, then you haven't deployed your app in line with Amazon guidelines.

Maybe because this has nothing to do with availability zones and it's specifically to do with AWS mis/under-reporting status.

What AZ were they supposed to failover to? Another one reporting green?

The dashboard shows region health, not AZ health. You don't even need cross-region deployment, just multi-AZ in the same region. The issue was isolated to a single AZ, not an entire region.

This is a strawman. We're not demanding red, but seeking yellow or orange or some other indicator that captures the impact. Absolutely not green.

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