Wouldn't it be great if Data Center and Clouds were like an REI Guarantee

I've been in Seattle for 20 years and one of the old time Seattleites conversation is around how low their REI number is. What?

REI assigns member numbers consecutively, they are serial numbers. Yesterday I was checking out at Seattle Main Store and the guy said, that is a low number, do you know when you signed up? I said can't remember, so he looked it up. June, 1967. My number is mid 5 digits. As I remember the store had already moved from Downtown up to Capitol Hill, in a building at 11th and Pine that is now home to a Bianchi bicycle dealer. There was only one store, and they sold a lot of army surplus and cheap but good stuff that kept you "warm even when wet", which was a common condition-wet was anyway. It was known as The Coop, and Coops of various kinds have a long history in Seattle. They had then as they do now a policy of "if it fails, bring it back". Now there are many stores, and I called and was told that new members are assigned numbers >7 million. I read in a Seattle Times article that after the Pike Place Public Market, the new downtown REI store is the #2 Seattle tourist attraction.

 

Part of the fanaticism is the REI Guarantee.  REI stands behind everything they sell.

The REI Guarantee

We stand behind everything we sell. If at any time your REI purchase doesn't meet your expectations, you can return it for a replacement or refund. What's more, if you're an REI member, you don’t even need a receipt—we'll have a record of your purchase.

http://www.rei.com/help/guarantee.html#ooid=g2OTFjMjrNwNqnO_CToUcx8sZsK8ZtKK

We have been outfitting outdoor adventurers since 1938. And in that time, we've learned a lot about what makes great gear. Our employees continually use all the gear we have to do the same activities that you do—from weekend day hikes to ascents in the Himalayas.

With recent outages wouldn't' it be great if there was a cloud provider that had the same customer loyalty and trivia on how low your number was because they have a guarantee like REI?

oops Salesforce.com down twice in two weeks

Salesforce has second outage in two weeks.

Seven instances went down at some time or another on Tuesday, starting with NA1, NA5 and NA6 in North America, according to a notice posted at 12:49 a.m. PDT on Salesforce.com's system status page. Shortly thereafter, the CS0, CS1, CS3 and CS12 regions, which are part of a set of "sandbox" instances Salesforce.com customers can use for development, testing and new feature previewing, were also affected, according to the site.

The official status is here.

The first status is this.

12:49 am PDT : NA1/NA5/NA6 Service Disruption
The salesforce.com Technology Team is currectly investigating a service disuption issue affecting the NA1/NA5/NA6 instance.
Please check the status of trust.salesforce.com frequently for updates regarding this issue.

The latest is here.

9:00 am PDT : NA1/NA5/NA6/CS0,CS3,CS1,CS12 salesforce.com System Status - Update
The salesforce.com Technology Team has restored the search functionality on the NA1, NA5, and NA6 instances.

The salesforce.com Technology Team continues to work on restoring the service on CS12 instances and the salesforce.com application configurator. 

Please check the status of trust.salesforce.com frequently for updates regarding this issue.

We'll see what the post mortem says the cause of this outage.

www.instagram.com still down, instagram.com up, DNS problems?

Two days ago Instagramhelp tweeted they are having problems.

We're currently experiencing technical difficulties and we're working to correct the issues. Thanks for your patience

8:16 PM - 29 Jun 12 via Twitter for Mac · Embed this Tweet

One simple problem is DNS is not working. instagram.com shows
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www.instagram.com does not resolve.
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This may seem like a minor issue, but if this isn't fixed I wonder how many other things Instagram is busy fixing.
It appears instagram ran into the same problem Loggly had with AWS service.

Loggly suffers extended outage after AWS reboot shuts down their service

MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2011 AT 9:29PM

Loggly a cloud service  that provides as one of its services System Monitoring and Alerting.

Systems Monitoring & Alerting

Alerting on log events has never been so easy.  Alert Birds will help you eliminate problems before they start by allowing you to monitor for specific events and errors.  Create a better user experience and improve customer satisfaction through proactive monitoring and troubleshooting. Alert Birds are available to squawk & chirp when things go awry.

But, Loggly has suffered an extended outage that was caused by AWS rebooting 100% of their servers, but that was only half the time down.  The other half was due to not knowing the service was down.

Google's Urs Hölzle Keynote annoucing Google Compute Engine at Google IO

See the below video to see Urs Hölzle annouce Google Compute Engine at Google IO 2012.

Sundar Pichai introduces Urs as one of the first 10 Google employees, the first VP of engineering, and the person more than any one else responsible for building all of Google's infrastructure (Data Centers, Servers, Network, and Infrastructure SW)

By the way I finally figured out how to embed a video and get it to start at a specific point of time, so this video will play at the 35m30s mark.

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If you want to see the scale of Google data centers look at how small Urs is compared to the server racks. :-)  

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The video is the one I referenced with this post.

Looks like this AWS outage will different than others given Instagram's long down time

Instagram is one of the latest poster child's of Amazon Web Service.  Netflix being a believer in Chaos Monkey and has recovered.  Meanwhile Instagram is still down.

Tweets Top / All

 
 
51s

 I can't see all the pictures I've posted? Same with all the other peoples...but thank you for fixing it!

 
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1m

  parts of it are.

 
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1m

    Bit many and temperamental! Blooming thunderstorm! :0( xx

 
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1m

 What happened to the pictures ? I can not see mine but it says how many i have

 
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    Watch TV and talk to humans?? xx

 
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AWS has gone down before, but a big service like Instagram has not been a result of down time.  AWS is mostly up, but not all.

Jun 30, 11:42 AM PDT We are continuing to work on processing our provisioning backlog for ELB load balancers. We are also continuing to work on restoring IO for the remaining small number of stuck EBS volumes. Customer action is required for EBS volumes that do not have IO currently enabled-- if you have not already chosen to Enable Volume IO, outlined in the instructions above, please follow those steps to re-enable IO on your EBS volumes.

It will be interesting what the post mortem looks like from AWS and Instagram on what the issues are.