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Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

It's the second time in less than a week that AWS have failed to update their status page during service disruption and then filed it under 'increased error rates'.

Don't get me wrong, I love AWS and use it every day, but it's a little insulting to pretend that things haven't gone wrong when they quite obviously have.

I know Amazon aren't the most transparent company in the world but why even bother having a status page if everyone has to turn to twitter to validate the outage?

Last night while sitting around waiting for cloudfront to come back so I could get on with my work I turned to HN to give me a bit of reading material. My word, sooooo many of the articles linked to on the front page were missing their static assets because of the AWS outage. Would be really interesting to know what percentage of the internet was affected.

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Its not the first time. Their status page is not trustworthy. When there was an issue a few weeks ago concerning the HVM? many instances were restarted. Status page showed green as if nothing had happened. They probably change it when its well known.

Its conflicting for a company to show its own status page I suppose. Its in its own interest to get it to be green as much as possible, even if its just for display's sake as a false sense of security.

Sounds like it's time for one of us to make an AWS status page. I wonder if it'd be possible?

Don't host it on AWS. :)

This is actually a hard problem because many of these services are localized using BGP anycasting. So the status checking would have to have probe nodes all over the world.

We learned about this particular outage from health checks we had set up in Pingdom. Somebody like them could expose those checks as a public service, and try to become the go-to place for getting the real status of AWS.

Seconded

At least for EC2 status updates and their color (green i, etc) are only posted if they meet certain thresholds. IE: Greater than $X number of instances are actually offline or unavailable etc.

Possibly many of the outages you happen to be seeing are in reality not that large thus not meeting the threshold to have a post, or major status update.

We started using Google Cloud Storage when it first came out so that user uploads would be closer to them (in theory) due to GCS' distributed design. They seem to have periods of 15-90 minutes every few months where they start timing out or giving us huge errors and often times we don't even hear about it either. They don't have a status page any only announce via email list - usually way after we've been scrambling.

Anybody else have a bad experience with Google Cloud Storage? I'm wondering if we're better off going with S3. Most users on my site are uploading photos, so when that dies, everything is down.

The Google Cloud status page is at https://status.cloud.google.com/

And there's a history page too, listing two outages for Cloud Storage:

https://status.cloud.google.com/summary

Are there independent services that monitor a range of hosting providers, cdn, etc. and keep a history that can be used for reference? I'm thinking someone like pingdom could do this.

https://cloudharmony.com/ does to some extent, though it's not exactly what your talking about

check out cedexis http://www.cedexis.com/reports/#?report=cdn_response_time&co...

Grammatical aside: I've noticed more usage of "company x are…" I never really went for "the data are/show/etc.", despite the learned Latin explanation. To me, "the data" indicates the same group as "the information" and is still singular. A company acting as an entity is singular. I hope the "company are" trend in writing doesn't catch on. (I never much liked "graphical" either) Flame away. :)

In American English, the correct form is "Company X is" where the company is considered singular. However, in British English, the correct form is/can be "Company X are" where the company is considered plural.

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1338/are-collecti...

1&1 are guilty of this too.

1&1 is the scum of the internet.

care to explain this ? whats wrong with 1&1 ?

Terrible technical setup, we have a dedicated server that can't be guaranteed an upgrade without losing the absolute server paths.

Bad services. Someone even social engineered our 1&1 account a few years back...

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