Ask HN: Why doesn't netflix use failover for amazon web services?

2 pointskuwachi2 comments

When reading the details about the Netflix outage, it looks like the N Virgina data centers were having problems. And upon reading further it looks like they only have one data center in the US.<p>What I don't understand is why doesn't Netflix failover to another datacenter (US-West for example) to continue at least partial service? Isn't that why the HA services exist? Thoughts?

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Netflix does use failover. Failover is to multiple availability zones - which is the mechanism that AWS provides. This particular outage was due to a major failure with Amazon's ELB service.

AWS doesn't provide HA like that, but yeah, they could. I suspect they do some of this for cost reasons, and its unfeasable for other locations.

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