Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage last week, affecting the thousands of Websites that rely on its services. Many startups and web companies who hosted their services on USA EAST region were affected in this outage. This is an embarrassing situation for Amazon Web Services, as more startups and other companies are increasingly deploying their systems daily and relying on AWS for their Web-scale computing infrastructure. This AWS outage has raised lots of questions in the minds of AWS users like whose fault is it? How can web applications avoid this in future?

Though the problem of Availability Zone interdependencies partly lies with AWS infrastructure many companies failed to recognize that the other part of the problem lies with their DEVOPS too. Every cloud expert will acknowledge that Mantra for successful architecture in AWS cloud is “Design for Failure” methodology and yet we observe that many companies did not adhere to that rule in this recent outage. The reasons could be ranging from technical awareness of configuring High availability to Cost of Operating a complex global HA setup in AWS.

In this article, we have shared some of our prior experience on architecting High availability systems on AWS as blueprints. We feel this small gesture will create HA awareness and help the strong AWS user community to build better solutions in the future.

The sample blueprints are
Blue print 1: How to achieve High Availability across AWS Regions?
Blue print 2: How to achieve High Availability across AWS Availability Zones (AZ’s)?
Note: As per AWS “By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location”, – but current outage has spanned across multiple AZ’s in USA East. Hopefully AWS will rectify these problems very soon once for all.

Feel free to reach out to 8KMiles anytime we would be happy to help you.