Amazon’s EBS system caused a days-long outage last week, which impacted almost everyone in the us-east-1 region.  I love reading a good postmortem, so I’m collecting here the useful writeups I’ve found (mostly on Hacker News) explaining what happened and how to improve.

Postmortems

• Official AWS postmortem: http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/
• Netflix: http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/04/lessons-netflix-learned-from-aws-outage.html
• Heroku: http://status.heroku.com/incident/151
• Twilio: http://www.twilio.com/engineering/2011/04/22/why-twilio-wasnt-affected-by-todays-aws-issues/
• Eric Hammond (AWS guru): http://alestic.com/2011/04/ec2-outage
• SimpleGEO: http://developers.simplegeo.com/blog/2011/04/26/how-simplegeo-stayed-up/

Analysis

• Greplin: http://tech.blog.greplin.com/aws-best-practices-and-benchmarks
• CloudHarmony: http://cloudharmony.com/b/2011/04/unofficial-ec2-outage-postmortem-sky-is.html
• Joyent: http://joyeur.com/2011/04/24/magical-block-store-when-abstractions-fail-us/
• O'reilly: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/04/the-aws-outage-the-clouds-shining-moment.html

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